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All-weather Friends

Henry Bigelow (left) and Columbus Iselin—the founder and second director of WHOI, respectively—stand on the deck of the Institution’s first research vessel, Atlantis. Iselin was a student of Bigelow’s at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and it was Bigelow who inspired him to pursue a career in oceanography before recruiting him to work at WHOI in 1930. Bigelow and Iselin collaborated in building Atlantis and, after Iselin succeeded his former teacher as director of WHOI, the two continued to work together for many years. Iselin received the Henry Bryant Bigelow Medal in Oceanography in 1966, one year before Bigelow’s death in 1967. (Photo courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Archives)