Julia Helped to Develop Shark Repellent
During the war, the US Navy had a strange issue that they never expected. Twenty naval officers were attacked by sharks that were swimming into mines that were meant to take down German u-boats underwater. So in order to stop the sharks from getting near the mines they had to develop a shark repellent that would keep them far away from blowing themselves up. The lab was led by two scientists; Captain Harold J. Coolidge from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Henry Field, who was the Curator at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. They approached General Donovan about creating a new group called The Emergency Rescue Equipment, or ERE.
General Donovan chose Julia for the job. At the time, she was actually terrible at cooking, and joked that it should be easy to figure out things sharks don’t like to eat. The team experimented with over 100 different substances, and they eventually settled for copper acetate, which had a 60% success rate. However, while it helped with sharks, they realized that other deadly fish, like barracudas and piranhas, were still a very real issue. So they settled on a black cake made out of dead shark meat mixed with the copper acetate. They were kept in tin cans, and spies would attach one of these little black cakes to their scuba gear while they were underwater. Each one of these successfully repelled carnivorous ocean life for 6 to 7 hours each.
In the book Sisterhood of Spies, Julia Child recalled how she felt about working together with the ERE. “I must say we had lots of fun. We designed rescue kits and other agent paraphernalia. I understand the shark repellent we developed is being used today for downed space equipment—strapped around it so the sharks won’t attack when it lands in the ocean.”
In 1944, Julia had risen in the ranks of the OSS until she reached the highest security clearance. Julia was sent on a mission to Sri Lanka, where she lived until 1945 as the Chief of The OSS Registry. On her termination papers at the end of the war, it says that her salary at the OSS was $2,980 per year. After inflation, that’s more like $41,281.07. So, while she made a decent living working for the government, her real success story was ahead of her.