Robert Rines

Robert Rines was born on August 30, 1922 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA as Robert Harvey Rines. He was married to Joanne Hayes, Carol Williamson and Dorothy Kay.

His classes in physics and engineering at MIT were difficult, so Rines wanted to transfer to Harvard, which led to clashing horns with his father. Rines stopped going to class and flunked out. His father threw him out of the house, and then helped him to find a janitorial job at MIT. Rines took the point and "became ashamed for not going to my classes, so I went back to summer school [and] made up the courses." In 1942, he graduated from MIT, at the top of his class, with a B.S. degree in physics.

In 1970, Rines headed a group funded by the Academy of Applied Science to search for the Loch Ness Monster. He did not prove the existence of Nessie, but his investigations at the Scottish lake have led to the discoveries of the remains of a British Wellington bomber lost during World War II, a series of underwater caves, previously unknown microbial life forms, and 12,000-year-old fossilized marine clams that indicate the loch's connection to the ocean in recent geological times.

Holder of more than 80 patents in technology that has been used to locate enemy submarines and sunken shipwrecks such as the ocean liner Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck, to guide Patriot missiles during the 1991 Gulf War, to create early-warning missile-detection systems, and to provide ultrasound imaging of internal organs.

Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, 1994.