Sea lions’ Navy larks
ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS
QUESTION What were the strangest ideas by the Board of Invention and Research?
THE Board of Invention and Research, set up by the Admiralty in 1915, tried out various bizarre ideas to deal with the German U-boat threat. These included trying to locate the subs using seagulls and sea lions, and smashing their periscopes with hammers.
Before the invention of sonar, submerged U-boats were almost impossible to spot. The only thing that gave them away was the periscope protruding above the surface of the sea.
Admiral Sir Frederick Samuel Inglefield was a distinguished former Sea Lord who had been sidelined as commander of the Motor Boat Reserve.
he was well acquainted with the voracious appetites of seagulls. his idea was to feed them from a custom-made periscope ‘from which at intervals food would be discharged like sausage meat from a machine’.
The idea was that gulls would learn to associate periscopes with food, so would fly around approaching German subs, revealing their whereabouts.
Tests were carried out in Poole harbour, but the birds didn’t make the connection between food and the false periscope.
Undeterred, Inglefield took the idea one step further. If the gulls could be trained to defecate on the periscope, the sub would be blinded. This failed, too.
A more direct approach was tried. Inglefield proposed equipping motor boat crews with a sack and large hammer. If a submarine’s periscope was spotted, a launch would be sent with one sailor to put the sack over the periscope while another would smash its lens with the hammer. It was never tested in combat.
Between November 1916 and mid-1917, circus performers Joseph and Fred Woodward and their sea lions joined the Navy.
experiments took place in public swimming baths in Glasgow and Westminster, at Lake Bala in Wales and on the Solent under the watchful eye of Dr e. J. Allen, director of the Marine Biological Association Laboratories in Plymouth.
As with the gulls, the training of the sea lions followed the principle of conditioned response rewarded by food. Unfortunately, if they spotted a shoal of fish, they disappeared for hours. The project’s failure did not deter the brothers. They returned to the circus as Captain Joseph and Captain Fred Woodward with their latest performing sensation, The Actual Admiralty U-boat hunting Sea Lions.
Keith Merton, South Molton, Devon.
QUESTION Are split infinitives bad grammar?
NEWSPAPER columnist Keith Waterhouse put it succinctly in his excellent book english Our english (And how To Sing It): ‘If the sense is there, let the sound be the judge . . .
‘heed the words of [detective fiction author] Raymond Chandler to one of his editors: “Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois, which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
‘. . . Or as Philip howard [writer and literary editor of The Times] put it: “We do not run the english language as a drillyard for grammarians.” ’
In The King’s english, Kingsley Amis described the use of the split infinitive as ‘the best-known of the imaginary rules that petty linguistic tyrants seek to lay upon the english language’.
he recalled that in his seminal Modern english Usage, lexicographer h.W. Fowler took 1,800 words to lay down his policy: ‘We will split infinitives rather than be barbarous or artificial; more than that, we will freely admit that sufficient recasting will get rid of any split infinitive without involving either of those faults.’ Amis said ‘anti-split-infinitive fanatics’ were beyond reason.
Harry Nuttall, Darwen, Lancs.
QUESTION Did the Romans ban geometry?
ACCORDING to Morris Kline in Mathematics For The Non-mathematician: ‘Roman jurists ruled, under the Code of Mathematicians and evil-Doers, that “to learn the art of geometry and to take part in public exercises, an art as damnable as mathematics, are forbidden”.’
This is a mistranslation of a famous phrase by the Roman emperor Diocletian, usually shortened to the ‘damnable art of mathematics’.
The confusion arises because the word mathematici was used by the Romans to mean astrologers.
The correct quote is: ‘To teach and exercise the art of geometry is in the public interest; the damnable art of astrology, however, is forbidden to every man.’
There were several purges of mathematici. In 33BC, Agrippa expelled them as charlatans and Tacitus records that in 52AD astrologers were banished by a fierce resolution from the senate. Those who practised geometry were quite safe.
Amy Keller, Malvern, Worcs.