Jean-Noël Decarpigny, Bernard Hamonic, Oscar Bryan Wilson Jr.; The design of low frequency underwater acoustic projectors: Present status and future trends, IEEE J. Oceanic Eng., vol. 16, pp. 107 - 122, January 1991.
Oscar B. Wilson was born in Texas in 1922. He received the B.S. degree in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1944 and the Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1951. His dissertation on the sound absorption in magnesium sulfate solutions was done under the direction of the late Prof. R. W. Leonard.
He served in the U.S. Navy as an Electronics Officer between 1944 and 1946. From 1951 to 1952, he was employed as a member of the technical staff in the radar department of Hughes Aircraft Company, Culver City, CA, then as a Research Physicist at the Bodine Soundrive Company, Los Angeles, CA, until 1957. He then joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. His teaching duties were primarily in acoustics, underwater sound, and especially sonar transducers. He is the author of a textbook on the last subject. His research interests have been in elastic and inelastic properties of materials, acoustic properties of marine sediments, ambient noise in the ocean, and acoustic transducer design. He retired from active teaching in 1994.
Dr. Wilson is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, a member of the American Physical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the Société Française d'Acoustique and the Society of the Sigma Xi. In 1992, he was awarded the Silver medal, la médaille d'argent (étranger), awarded each year by the Société Française d'Acoustique to a foreign acoustical scientist for interactions with French acousticians.