For a while now, I’ve been diving into the history of our science and turning some of those stories into long-form articles for a general audience. Since traditional publishing hasn’t panned out (yet!), I decided to step outside my comfort zone and turn this writing into YouTube videos instead of letting them collect digital dust.
The first one covers the development of empirical wave forecasting by Harold Sverdrup and Walter Munk for the Allied D-Day landings. Video editing is completely new to me, but it was a fun experiment. I’m hoping to do the next one on the 1950s Stereo Wave Observation Project. Thought this crowd might enjoy a look, and I welcome feedback: https://youtu.be/sFT1k1VMgd4?si=IZx2o2XfVYv-zQG_
Hey Tripp! I just watched your video on Sverdrup and Munk’s invaluable contributions to the success of D-Day landings. Amazing and so informative. Thank you for putting this together and I look forward to more episodes! The only thing I would suggest is to superimpose text of the questions you ask on the images shown while you’re asking them. This would help highlight the importance of the questions, aid viewers in following along, and create greater anticipation about learning the answers.
Hi Tripp, thanks for trying that. Yes, digital dust is not so good (did you pick that phrase from Rick Beato ?) and congrats for trying this out. I think it would be nice to have a your list of references. The Bates paper I have is not the one you are showing … so I’m curious about which one it is (I have a 1949 New York Academy of Science paper titled “Utilization of wave forecasting in the invations of Normandy, Burma and Japan”). All the best, Fabrice
Thanks Fabrice. I will try to pull together a reference list, but I was not so organized in this regard. I used a lot of first person accounts from Walter Munk. Mainly his writing and lectures over the years. Munk was a master story teller, and I got the impression that he worked these stories out over time, tweaking this or that to imrpove the telling to the point that the relationship to the historical facts was no longer so clear. I’ll give an example. I repeat Munk’s account that he was called up to the Pentagon and worked alone, essentially self-directed, until he called Sverdrup for help. There is account in “Science and Security before the Atomic Bomb: The Loyalty Case of Harald U. Sverdrup” (this is interesting in its own right), but it that says that it began with Roger Revelle. It was Revelle who had suggested Sverdrup take on the surf problem after finding discrepancies between the existing British method and a method by Seiwell (which I could never track down). Revelle, at the time active in the Navy, was able to get approval for Sverdrup to work on weather and surf, Sverdrup was barred from more sensitive anti-submarine / acoustics work. Munk, the new graduate student, was brought in by Sverdrup. These versions are essentially incompatable. Potentially the answer is the stacks at SIO but I don’t have the resources to track it down, so I went with Munk’s version for now. Anyway, I think you are talking about this Bates paper? And I used to watch a lot of Beato, so perhaps it seaped into my subconcious
