Obituary

What he saw on that day in June 1972 he described as well as he could. It was a hump about 25 feet (8 metres) long, covered with rough dark-grey hide like an elephant’s back. The creature it belonged to ploughed against the current for a while, and then disappeared. It had presumably returned to its haunts in the murky, peaty depths of the lake. But Mr Rines’s life was upside down. The star lecturer in innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the founder and president of the Academy of Applied Science, now had a myth on his hands. He determined to substantiate it with all the cash he could raise and all the expertise he could muster, because the alternative was ridicule, or worse. Galileo sometimes sprang to mind.

He could have refused to believe his eyes, of course. Plenty of others suggested that he had really seen a tree trunk, a huge eel, a seal, an otter, an upturned boat or a ripple of wind on water. The creature had appeared at dusk, an illusory time of day. More pertinently, Mr Rines was already primed to see something in the loch. The year before he had taken part, half-sceptically, in experiments with underwater microphones that had picked up “bird-like chirps” in the deeps, and he had even had a perfume concocted to draw shy Nessie to his boat. His favourite reading then was Constance Whyte’s “More than a Legend”, which argued for the creature’s existence with testimony from witnesses she knew. With her, he agreed that this was “a really super ‘whodunit’”—a murder in which “the witnesses have seen the corpse, but cannot produce it.” Perhaps he could.

Instead he produced some famous photographs. They were taken in August 1972 by an underwater camera triggered by a sonar beam, and seemed to show a diamond-shaped flipper attached to a large underbelly. Everything was greenish and grainy, and the unretouched prints looked more like the lake-bed with a flurry of stirred-up sand. But they were published in Nature, and on the strength of them hearings were held in Parliament and a Latin name, Nessiteras rhombopteryx, was attached to the creature by Sir Peter Scott, a prominent naturalist. It was said to be a sort of plesiosaur, somehow stranded in the loch from 65m years ago. Sir Peter, better known for geese, painted a picture of a pair of them plumply swimming.

Very like a whale

Mr Rines thought the Latin moniker had clinched it. But his evidence was still too sparse. During the war he had developed a radar that could detect aircraft at 200 miles through cloud; in 1985 his inventions in sonar helped to find the drowned Titanic in the North Atlantic; during the first Gulf war his technology guided Patriot missiles to their targets. But he was stumped by the gloomy profundities of Loch Ness. Scientist friends from MIT lent their expertise, at arm’s length. The most he heard, from sonar echoes in 1997, was very like a whale. The most he ever fished up—in 2008, on the last of almost 30 trips, when he supposed that the creature was dead and was looking for its carcass—was an old tyre cut about a bit, which could have looked quite humpish on the surface.

Even close family members, taken reverently into the “Nessie room” in his Boston apartment or instructed never to be without cameras on Scottish holidays, could not quite understand his obsession. But as well as being a scientist, Mr Rines was for 50 years a patent lawyer. His appetite for inventions went back to his childhood, when he had devised a fork and spoon that could fit into a penknife. He was pipped on that one, but died with around 100 patents to his name, most of them improvements to imaging things. A visit to his doctor for cataracts gave him his last invention, when he suggested a longer exposure of his eyeball to ultrasound radiation and found, on looking from his window that night, that the lights round Logan Airport were suddenly crystal clear.

He never saw clearly enough to find Nessie—except on that one day in 1972, when he had been too moved and excited to work the Super-8 camera that shook in his hand. But the founder of the Academy of Applied Science, and the patent lawyer, regularly recognised himself in the inventors, old and young, who came to see him. The streak of craziness; the thrill of the quest; the frequent difficulty of describing what their invention was, how it worked, what it was for; their vulnerability to ridicule, because what they had done or thought was new; and the need to protect that thought, as something interesting and precious in itself. Mr Rines’s generosity and openness to them was no more than he hoped for for himself, as he sat patiently in his waterproofs, waiting, beside a Scottish shore.