Robert H. Rines

Robert Harvey Rines (1922 to 2009) was an American lawyer, inventor, musician and composer, best known for his long search for the Loch Ness monster. Born in Boston on 30 August 1922, he took a science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1943, a law degree at Georgetown University in 1946 and a doctorate at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan in 1972. As an Army Signal Corps officer in the Second World War he helped develop the Microwave Early Warning System, and his later patents on high-resolution radar and sonar imaging brought his induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994. He held dozens of United States patents, was a leading intellectual property lawyer, founded the Franklin Pierce Law Center and the Academy of Applied Science, and lectured at Harvard and MIT until he retired from MIT in 2008 after 45 years. He also composed music for Broadway and off-Broadway shows. From 1972 he led expeditions to Loch Ness with electronic and photographic equipment mostly of his own design, but the evidence he gathered did not convince the scientific community.