Hartley Hoskins
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution announces with great sorrow the death of retiree Hartley Hoskins on January 1, 2021. He was 82.
Over a career of 57 years at WHOI, Hartley combined technical expertise with dedication and loyalty to the Institution that won the respect and affection of all who knew him. He recognized that the conduct of ocean research often crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries and that technological advancements were crucial to progress in understanding the ocean. While his own selected discipline was marine geology and applications of seismic profiling, he was a polymath with substantial expertise, for example, in electricity and electronics, communications, computer networking, and ship operations. In his years at WHOI Hartley participated in thirty oceanographic cruises including one on the Institution’s first ship, the R/V Atlantis, a 143 ft. sailing ketch, and one on the first leg of the R/V Atlantis II.
Hartley was born near Rochester, New York, the son of a medical doctor. For several years during his adolescence, Hartley’s family lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands where his father worked at a tuberculosis hospital near Christiansted, St. Croix. Later, the family returned to Rochester where, during high school, Hartley studied piano and organ at the Eastman School of Music, learning skills he practiced for the rest of his life, including at weekly sessions at the Christian Science Church in Falmouth.
Hartley’s career started in an era in ocean sciences that most of us only read about. As an undergraduate at MIT (B.S. 1959), he took classes from both Philip Morse and Herman Feshbach, co-authors of a classic textbook: “Methods of Theoretical Physics”. He was in the same undergraduate class at MIT as Lynn Sykes, a famous seismologist at Lamont, who used earthquake source mechanisms to map the relative motion of tectonic plates.
Hartley’s interest in oceanography was sparked by an MIT undergraduate seminar in oceanography, taught by WHOI geophysicist Bracket Hersey in spring 1958. As a result, Hartley was recruited to spend the following summer at Woods Hole helping test new equipment for seismic profiling and involving a cruise on the R/V Bear. This provided the data for his MIT Senior Thesis (“Primer on seismic reflection data acquisition and analysis”) and the beginning of his lifelong primary disciplinary specialty.
Hartley continued his studies at the University of Chicago while working summers at WHOI until 1961, when he received his Master’s degree, and then as a Summer Student Fellow at WHOI from May 1962 to December 1964. His first publications under the supervision of Bud Knott, Betty Bunce, John Graham, and Brackett Hersey were on geophysical investigations of the Gulf of Maine which appeared in Oceanus and the Journal of Geology in 1961.
Hartley received his Doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1965 with a dissertation entitled: “Seismic reflection observations on the Atlantic continental shelf, slope and rise southeast of New England”. Part of his tenure as a graduate student was covered under a Ford Foundation Fellowship. His exam committee consisted of Robert Miller and John Jamieson from the University of Chicago and Brackett Hersey and Earl Hays from WHOI. He held an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago from 1965 to 1966. After the postdoctoral fellowship, he spent a summer of sonar surveying at Mediterranean archaeological sites with underwater photography pioneer Harold Edgerton of MIT. For two years Hartley then taught undergraduate geology at the University of Ghana.
On returning to WHOI’s Geology and Geophysics Department in June 1968 he worked on various aspects of reflection seismology under the direction of Sydney “Bud” Knott and Betty Bunce in the marine geophysics group headed by Brackett Hersey. As an applications programmer, he carried out the quantitative analysis of sedimentary reflectivity, coding seismic processing software, the quieting of towed streamers, development of a flow-film reproportioning camera, and one project, for which he received a patent, summing returns from streamer sections to create a synthetic aperture. In 1973-74, working with K.O. Emery, Hartley participated on seven of the fourteen legs on R/V Atlantis II of the IODE (International Oceanographic Data Exchange) West African project. Over three hundred sonobuoy reflection profiles were acquired for which Hartley did the data reduction.
During the 1970s, as the oil drilling industry moved into increasingly deeper water, Hartley recognized the relevance of WHOI seismic information and technology to petroleum exploration companies. In 1977 he took on management of the Ocean Industry Program (OIP), which provided archived data, technology insights, and geoscience briefings to subscribing companies. He expressed gratitude for the assistance of Mildred Teal during those years. The revenues thus derived provided for unencumbered support of new WHOI projects. One of these was the Institution’s 1978 venture into word processing in which Hartley played a seminal role. The first installation was a Wang word processor consisting of a central server with four workstations (files were stored on 9-inch floppy discs). It grew to two servers and twenty-nine workstations. More importantly, it gave the Institution experience that shepherded in the new era of personal desk-top computers and word processors.
His experience with OIP and elsewhere led Hartley to recognize the use of patents and other intellectual property rights in capturing the value of ideas and technology innovations. In 1984 he became secretary of the WHOI Patents and Inventions Committee. Through independent study and a summer course at Franklin Pierce Law Center he passed the U.S Patent and Trademark Office patent bar exam in 1989 and was certified as Patent Agent #33,903.
Prior to 1983, students in the MIT/WHOI joint Ph.D. program had to physically commute back and forth to Cambridge for classes. Hartley conceived and designed a microwave link that carried not only the video-linked classes but also all of WHOI’s internet traffic and provided for foreign exchange telephone service. Afterwards, Hartley was involved in setting up (and sometimes digging trenches for) other telephone and broadband cable systems, copper and fiber network wiring, and switch upgrades. As Network Group Leader in the WHOI Computer and Information Services department, he was instrumental in establishing high-speed internet services to a pool of Woods Hole institutions and he completed the installation of a second fiber-optic cable linking the Quissett Campus and village properties to provide redundant, campus-wide communications. For three years he was network chairman of the New England Nortel Users Group (about two hundred members).
Between 1984 and 2001, working with Ralph Stephen, Steve Swift, and Tom Bolmer, Hartley operated borehole seismic instruments on seven Ocean Drilling Program cruises. Ralph credited him with the success of the seismic components of the downhole measurements program through his pro-active recommendations for improvements to all aspects of the operation: scientific goals, instrumentation, engineering, and management. On ODP Leg 179 he made the first concurrent drill-string-accelerometer and ocean-bottom-seismic measurements in the development of the seismics-while-drilling technology.
Another of Hartley’s versatile WHOI adventures, of which he was proud, involved assistance with the lengthening and re-engining of the R/V Knorr and her sister ship the R/V Melville from 1992-94, a difficult project that he characterized as “complicated and confrontational” but after which both ships performed for many years in an exemplary manner.
Over the course of nearly six decades at WHOI, Hartley was an integral part of the WHOI fabric, raising the level of endeavor and accomplishment across the entire Institution. He retired from WHOI in 2015 but continued to volunteer in the WHOI Archives until 2017.
Throughout most of his years in Falmouth, Hartley resided in the area known as Sippewissett, where, in 1969, he was a founder of the Sippewissett Association. He was President for several years during the 1990s. In part a watchdog organization, the Association guards the residential nature of the neighborhood and deeded access to the water’s edge, repeatedly threatened over the years. In particular, the beach at Gunning Point and adjacent community lands, serving 193 lot-owners, were threatened with capture by a private interest starting in 1980. The matter was not legally resolved until 2010, throughout which time Hartley never faltered in his commitment to safeguard the community’s interest. In 2016 a new local access to the town woodland of over 350 acres was dedicated in his name, in gratitude for his many years of selfless community service.
He is survived by his wife of 41 years, Rosemary Hoskins, of Falmouth, and their son Andrew, of Spencer, New York; Margaret M. Shea, of Gradyville, Pennsylvania, the mother of his three grandchildren, Hannah, Noreen, and Calvin Hoskins; and a younger brother, Kim Hoskins, who resides at the family homestead in Bloomfield, N.Y. Hartley was pre-deceased by his first wife, Judith Brennan.
A celebration of life service will be announced at a future date.
Information for this obituary is from Hartley’s family and the WHOI archives.