Among other accomplishments, Spilhaus is credited with proposing the establishment of Sea Grant Colleges at a meeting of the American Fisheries Society in 1963 as a parallel to the successful land-grant university system, which he claimed was "one of the best investments this nation ever made.

"[1] Spilhaus was born in 1911 in Cape Town, South Africa, grandson of the Scottish mathematician Thomas Muir.

[2] In 1936, Spilhaus joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, where he developed the bathythermograph, which made the measurement of ocean depths and temperatures from a moving vessel possible, a device which proved indispensable to submarine warfare.

[12] However it wasn't until 1979 that he published maps using continental shorelines as "natural boundaries", including one that has become the typical example of Spilhaus's technique.

[13] In 1991, Spilhaus published Atlas of the World illustrated with a large selection of maps having "geophysical boundaries", typically coastlines, in various orientations and for various purposes.