"Joe" Worzel might have had a claim to be the greatest mechanic on the planet but, unusually, he applied his extraordinary talent for tinkering with machinery not on the earth's surface but to pioneering work at the bottom of its oceans. His death at the age of 89 last month in North Carolina has been widely mourned in the oceanographic scientific community.

With his mentor and long-time boss, William Maurice Ewing, he assembled instruments out of spare parts and household items to map the ocean floor and to measure how sound carried in the depths. His work, often financed by the US Navy, also provided the basis of the anti-submarine technology that was an integral part of US security during the cold war.