Book 26, Question 36
How did the Titanic disaster lead to sonar?
Off Newfoundland, it detected an iceberg about two miles away.
After the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in 1912, inventors looked for ways to find hidden dangers at sea by sound. In 1914, a Canadian inventor, Reginald Fessenden, built a device that sent out sound pulses and picked up echoes. During World War I, other inventors, such as Paul Langevin in France, improved the idea to find submarines. Bats and dolphins use echoes too, but sonar was not copied from them.