Background
John Edwards Tyler (1911-1992) was born on November 11, 1911 in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied in optics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) and completed a thesis in spectrophotometry and colorimetry. Tyler joined the National Research
Corporation in 1941, and in 1944 transferred to Research Laboratories of the Interchemical Corporation in New York. Meanwhile,
Dr. Seibert Q. Duntley founded the Visibility Laboratory at MIT in 1939. By the late 1940s, Vis Lab began to focus more heavily
on ocean optics, and moved to San Diego, California and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1952. Duntley recruited
Tyler to the new Vis Lab location, where he worked on the development and testing of optical instruments, such as photometers
used to take radiance distribution measurements.