Robert Rines lawyer, composer, inventor and physicist but best known as a cryptozoologist

Robert Rines

Robert Rines, who died on November 1 aged 87, was an lawyer, composer, inventor and physicist but best known in Britain as a cryptozoologist who used some of his inventions to try to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster.
Rines invented prototype technology that led to sharper resolution in radar, sonar and the ultrasound imaging of internal organs.

In 1985 researchers used underwater vessels with sonar equipment developed by Rines to find the wreck of Titanic, which sank in waters a mile and a half deep in the North Atlantic in 1912. The systems were also used in 1989 to find the wreck of the German battleship Bismarck, which was sunk at the Battle of Denmark Strait off Iceland during the Second World War.

Rines’s inventions also became crucial parts of long-range navigation systems, in which seagoing vessels and aircraft are located by determining the time difference between pulsed radio transmissions from two stations.

While his inventions had obvious and important military and medical applications, they also led to some remarkable images from the depths of Loch Ness, produced by sonar and underwater cameras. Rines claimed that they showed evidence of the existence of a huge beast, possibly a plesiosaur, an aquatic reptile thought to have died out with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

“It’s a ridiculous idea,” Rines admitted in 2000. “If I didn’t trust the people I’ve talked to and our own scientific evidence, I’d say I was crazy. I may not be able to prove it, but I know there was a plesiosaur in Loch Ness because I saw it.”

Rines’s epiphany occurred on June 23 1972, when he apparently sighted the creature while attending a tea party on the banks of the loch near Inverness with his first wife, Carol, and two friends. Spotting an odd shape moving across the water, he grabbed a telescope and through it saw “a large, darkish hump, covered... with rough, mottled skin, like the back of an elephant”.

The encounter fired an enthusiasm that became a passion, and drew Rines back to Scotland every few years, hoping to use better imaging and tracking technology to capture sharper images of the animal, which he reckoned was 45ft long with a 4ft or 5ft-long neck.

In an attempt to record the beast on film as well as sonar, Rines deployed a series of underwater cameras, suspended from two boats, with strobe lighting to illuminate the loch’s murky depths. In August 1972 the cameras captured an image that seemed to show a large flipper, and in June 1974 another apparently showed a close-up of the head and upper neck of an unknown creature. A further shot seemed to show something with a long neck, small head and large body, something resembling a plesiosaur.

The pictures, published in the highly respected Nature magazine in December 1975, caused a sensation. Experts including the British television naturalist Sir Peter Scott agreed that they indicated the existence of some sort of large animate object in the waters of the loch. Furthermore, Scott declared that he was convinced that “this is no hoax”, and bestowed the Latin name Nessiteras rhombopteryx on Rines’s “monster”.

“I thought that would clinch it,” Rines remarked gloomily, “but, as you know, it didn’t at all.”

In 1997 Rines and a team of scientists that included his 24-year-old son, Justice, returned to Loch Ness with an American television crew, and made two sonar contacts with objects the size of small whales. Four years later Rines’s team shot a video showing a 40ft-long V-shaped wake on the surface of the loch.

Last year Rines announced that he was giving up his search for “Nessie”. His fears that she may have perished, the victim perhaps of global warming, generated the improbable Daily Star headline “LOCH NESS MONSTER DIES AGED 3 MILLION”. But Rines’s investigations in the depths of the loch did lead to at least one unchallenged discovery, that of the remains of an RAF Wellington bomber lost during the Second World War.

Rines’s radar technology patent — developed while he was a student at a university radiation laboratory and refined during service as a US Signal Corps’ officer during the Second World War — formed the underlying technology used to guide Patriot missiles during the 1991 Gulf War and to produce early warning missile-detection systems and other sophisticated military hardware.

Away from his laboratory bench, Rines also wrote music for more than 10 Broadway and off-Broadway productions, and shared an Emmy for his work on Hizzoner — The Mayor, a show about the former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

Robert Harvey Rines was born on August 20 1922 in Boston, the son of a patent lawyer who taught at Harvard. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Robert studied Physics and Engineering, but left after his father refused to let him transfer to Harvard in the expectation of an easier time there. His parent promptly threw him out of the family home, and the young Rines went to live with an aunt. The rift with his father was soon repaired, and the shamefaced prodigal returned to his studies at MIT, graduating top of his class in 1942.

As an outstanding student at MIT’s new radiation laboratory, Rines had worked on the development of high-resolution image-scanning radar, knowledge that he applied to his wartime service with the US Signal Corps.

Posted to Britain, he trained to operate anti-aircraft radar and carried out crucial research during the establishment of the US Army’s top secret microwave early warning system, used to detect aircraft movement in overcast skies at 200 miles range. By the end of the war he was commanding officer of the research group stationed at Fort Drum naval research laboratory in upstate New York.

Returning to civilian life, Rines became a patent office examiner, and studied Law at night school. After receiving a Law degree from Georgetown, and completing a doctoral thesis at China’s National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, he worked for more than 50 years as an attorney specialising in patent law, helping hundreds of American inventors as a litigation advocate.

In the 1960s Rines lectured on patent law at Harvard and MIT, and in 1963 founded the Academy of Applied Science at Concord, New Hampshire, to promote creative and innovative scientific thought among young students as well as adults. In 1973 he established the Franklin Pierce Law Centre, New Hampshire’s only law school, renowned for its intellectual property law programme.

Rines taught for more than 50 years at MIT, focusing on invention, patents and innovation, before retiring in May 2008. One of his ventures in the entertainment world was a ballet he produced, Life at MIT.

Rines was motivated by a determination to find creative solutions to problems. “He just thought of things that nobody ever thought of, he just thought there was nothing you couldn’t do if you think about it and you wanted to do it, just figure out how to get it done,” his second wife, Joanne, recalled. Rines donated his radar patent to the United States government, and gave the imaging patent to the rest of the world to use for nothing. In all he held more than 80 patents.

Rines was inducted into the US National Inventors’ Hall of Fame and the US Army Signal Regiment, as a distinguished member. His underwater photographs of Loch Ness hang in the American Inventors’ Hall of Fame along with a painting of how he imagined “Nessie” might look. He kept a cottage on the shores of Loch Ness at Tychat, as well as a home in New England.

Robert Rines is survived by his second wife, two sons, a daughter and a stepdaughter.

[ R.I.P. ]

Just leaves you in awe reading all the things he contributed to the world and accomplished.

Most of all though it's just so sad he died thinking Nessie had.