Robert Rines: Monster Hunter

Science and mythology are often construed as antipodes: the realm of hard facts versus that of full-blown fantasy. For Robert Rines, however — scientist, inventor, composer, renowned patent lawyer and the world’s most dogged cryptozoological sleuth on the trail of the Loch Ness Monster — there was no disparity between the two. Myth for him was not only science’s first permutation but also its ongoing impetus, both modes of expression proceeding as they do from the same common denominator: wonder.

From early childhood, Rines led a life predicated on daydreams and the good fortunes that tend to follow the people who dare to make them real. Born in Boston, he began his career as an inventor at age 6, devising his own multipurpose pocketknife. He first picked up a violin at age 4, played an impromptu duet at age 11 with none other than Albert Einstein (whom, Rines always maintained, he decidedly outplayed) and in high school formed his own band, the Six Aces of Rhythm, for which he wrote musical arrangements. During that time, he also attended composition classes at Harvard.

Leaving high school early to study physics and engineering at M.I.T., Rines graduated in 1942 near the top of his class with both a physics degree and his first full musical score, “Life at M.I.T.,” a piece that in 1999 would be performed as a ballet at Lincoln Center. He joined the Army Signal Corps after college as a radar officer and helped invent the Army’s then-top-secret Microwave Early Warning System, used to detect aircraft in overcast skies at a 200-mile range. Rines’s radar and sonar innovations, two of the more than 100 patents he accrued in his life, would later be used for everything from guiding Patriot missiles to developing ultrasound imaging to finding the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck. He earned a law degree from Georgetown in 1947 and spent more than 50 years specializing and lecturing in patent law at M.I.T, Harvard and the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire, which he founded in 1973. In his spare time, Rines would invent everything from an ingenious set of hinged chopsticks to a new ultrasound-radiation treatment for cataracts, as well as compose scores for more than 10 Broadway and Off Broadway shows and the Emmy Award-winning music for the television version of the play “Hizzonor the Mayor.”

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