Subsea optics and imaging (original) (raw)

2013

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this chapter the ideas of explorers and scientists on transparency and colouring issues of natural waters are sketched over a period between 1600 and 1930, from the time of Sir Francis Bacon to Chandrasekhara Raman. This history features famous scientists as well as various amateurs who were intrigued by these optical phenomena. We also discuss are a number of pieces of interesting equipment that were developed to quantify the intrinsically coupled transparency and colour of the sea. The Secchi disc (to determine water transparency) and the Forel–Ule scale (to classify sea and colour) are two, from the end of the nineteenth century, which have withstood the time. The hidden mechanisms for the colouring of water were only solved at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is argued that this delay was partially caused by the fact that the subject was mostly treated as marginal; also, if pure water distillation techniques had been fully developed earlier, this understanding could have been shifted backwards by decades. This chapter ends with Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who proved in 1922 that molecular scattering of light in water, in combination with the absorption of the longer wavelengths, caused the blue colour of the sea. In his Nobel lecture ‘On the colour of the sea’ on December 11, 1930 he explained his findings to the world.

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