I don’t care what anybody thinks, you have to find out what that was
Once Nessie has been found, only the Abominable Snowman will be left to quest for
“I say,” the newlyweds’ host motioned toward the large, gray object jutting from the water’s surface, “is that an upturned boat?”
Robert Rines interrupted the porch tea party to grab a telescope for closer look. The “large, darkish hump” remained in place long enough for the Boston-born polymath to study its “rough, mottled skin” from afar. Though no one else was apparently around to witness the extended breach, it afforded the honeymooning American couple and their friend a good 10 minutes of gawking.
“I don’t care what anybody thinks,” Carol Rines told her new husband, “you have to find out what that was.”
Over the course of his life, Robert Rines was granted more than 80 (100+, by some accounts) patents, ranging from ultrasound waves for treating cataracts to a hinge for chopsticks. He composed music for Broadway shows, founded a private law school and taught at MIT for 45 years. At a Maine summer camp, an 11-year-old Rines played a violin duet with Albert Einstein (later claiming he outplayed the theoretical physicist).
“Few Americans have made such a sweeping contribution to the process and business of inventing as Robert Rines,” MIT wrote, in reference to his microwave scanning system, “a trailblazer in the realms of invention, education, law, and public policy.”
But it was at age 50 that he would set out on the mission of his life.
He devoted much of the next 35 years to finding the Loch Ness Monster, inventing various camera and sonar technologies designed to capture the definitive image of the elusive creature. A series of strobe-lit cameras were installed in the lake, eventually replaced a single computer-guided combination sonar/camera device suspended from a floating platform roughly 600 yards from the shore. It wasn’t long before he was able to produce underwater photos of the beast that purportedly showed a blurry fin.
By 1975, three years after his initial encounter, he captured a blurry underwater head. The images – combined with Rines’ standing in the scientific community – were enough to warrant serious examination. The Guardian, however, objected to such scientific expeditions, on the grounds of the monster’s safety,
[N]othing would be sadder than for Nessie's existence to be established beyond doubt. Sooner or later, monsters would be captured. The 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act offers, as a debate in the Lords six years ago revealed, no protection to monster invertebrates […] Besides, a world where dodos are dead and Phoenixes fabled needs the odd mythical beast. Once Nessie has been found, only the Abominable Snowman will be left to quest for.
The U.K. paper was, ultimately, skeptical of suggestions that the lake was home to surviving plesiosaurs, instead suggesting that such sightings could be chalked up to wind, waves and giant seals. Rines, for his part, believed he found sonar-guided proof that Loch Ness had once been connected to the ocean. A family of the large aquatic reptiles made their home in the Scottish Highlands, he reasoned, adapting to fresh water and staving off various mass extinctions. Ultimately, the evidence proved inconclusive, leaving many doubting both the veracity of the photos and the creature’s existence.
“At first I thought the monster theory had been proved,” a retired Scottish librarian told the Associated Press at the time. “But when I heard the descriptions of a ‘gargoyle‐like’ head with two appendages, my memory immediately clicked about the model.”
Roy Muir, a self-professed Nessie expert, claimed to have seen the monster four times in 15 years, but was convinced the images showed a 30-foot monster model built for the 1970 film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Director Billy Wilder asked the effects team to remove the model monster’s humps, causing it to lose buoyancy and sink. In 2016, an underwater robot captured images of the nearly 50-year-old prop resting at the bottom of the lake.
Rines’ own expeditions were less fruitful — but not for lack of effort or inventiveness. He worked with a perfumer to design a scent that would attract the monster and attempted to train a team of freshwater dolphins to carry around cameras that could capture the beast.
By the dawn of the 80s, however, encounters with Nessie had dried up, despite his continued efforts. The inventor grew increasingly convinced that the monster – while real – had died at some point over the previous decade. He continued his pursuit, though the goal shifted from capturing a living dinosaur to finding a fresh skeleton.
Rines outlived the monster by several decades. He died in 2009, at age 87, his faith in the creature never shaken. “They can just call me crazy, and that’s okay by me,” he told a local magazine, a year before his death. “At least I won’t go to jail for it, like Galileo.”
Sources:
Robert Rines, Inventor and Monster Hunter, Dies at 87 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/us/08rines.html
Loch Ness Monster Makes Waves Again https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1975/12/05/78274254.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
We say hands off Nessie https://www.theguardian.com/technology/1975/nov/24/lochnessmonster
Film's lost Nessie monster prop found in Loch Ness https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-36024638
Robert Rines Microwave Scanning System https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/robert-rines