Science: Waves Under the Sea

In the 60-year history of radio, man has learned to send signals over mountains, across oceans, and up to the moon and back. But the search for a radio that could transmit signals beneath the water's surface was sterner. To receive messages in World War II, subs had to surface or poke up the antenna-bearing periscope and risk detection. Last week word leaked that the U.S. Navy has whipped this underwater communications problem.

On a peninsula jutting from the rocky northern coast near Cutler, Me., the Navy is building a $63 million transmitter complex that, by any measure, will rank as the...

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