THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 24, 1996 TAG: 9602240002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
How about a 19th-century naval officer whose fertile mind helped link America and Europe by cable, who improved the power of heavy guns, whose genius had a role in the first battle of the ironclads here in Hampton Roads, and who went on to add colonel to his naval rank of captain?
Well, inventions and inventors have always turned me on. So I was really off and running when I came across a reference to the feats - and all kinds of Virginia connections - of Capt. John Mercer Brooke. I was reading New Lands, New Men, a book of several years back by William H. Goetzmann.
In this action-saga about three centuries of European and American exploration, Brooke, a Naval Academy graduate, appears as one of the more illustrious figures in what was called the North Pacific Expedition, a venture launched from our own Chesapeake Bay in 1853.
He had just served a stint at the Naval Observatory, where Virginia's Matthew Fontaine Maury was superintendent. At the observatory, Brooke came up with an idea which not only assisted Maury in his famed sea-mapping work, but made possible the laying of that first communications cable across the Atlantic.
His creation was a sea-bottom sounding device which overcame the problems presented by great depths (enough weight to reach bottom fast enough would be too much weight to retrieve without breaking the sounding line). The solution Brooke presented to Maury was a rig which detached the weight when it struck a solid surface, allowing retrieval of a simple rod (with bottom samples stuck to it).
Then-Lieutenant Brooke went on to make successful Pacific soundings (2 1/2 miles down in the Coral Sea, for example) and to win a reputation as one of the ablest leaders in the surveying squadron.
Farther along, after he had become chief of ordnance and hydrography for the Confederacy, he suggested a new placement of powder in the 13-inch Blakley rifle that survived initial skepticism and led to greater efficiency in such heavy weaponry.
Even more dramatic was his contribution to naval ship design, also during the Civil War. For in the conversion of the scuttled ram Merrimack into the armor-plated warship Virginia, Brooke had a chief role, including the invention of the ``submerged end.'' This maintained buoyancy with less exposure to opponent's fire in that subsequent battle with the Union's Monitor, an encounter which changed marine warfare for all time.
Granted, Brooke's high place in these and other phases of history is nothing new for some who may be reading this. Close students of the Civil War, for example. And to cap it all, he made a distinguised post-war career for himself in Lexington, where he was professor of astronomy and physics at Virginia Military Institute for three and a half decades, adding that ``colonel'' and becoming a part of the lore of the school for its many cadets in his time and since.
But for an invention buff like me, Captain/Colonel Brooke was quite a discovery. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk.
by CNB