Whose seafloor-spreading hypothesis of 1962 underpinned plate tectonics?

Harry Hess, whose paper proposed that new ocean floor is created at mid-ocean ridges and destroyed in trenches, so the seabed is a conveyor belt. He called it geopoetry, expecting not to be believed.

The evidence had come from a war. Hess commanded a transport ship in the Pacific and left the echo sounder running everywhere he went, mapping seamounts and trenches nobody had known were there; wartime magnetic surveys, looking for submarines, produced the other half. The clinching pattern was symmetrical stripes of alternating magnetic polarity either side of the ridges - the Earth's field reverses periodically, and cooling lava records whichever direction it had at the time, so the seafloor is a paired tape recording running outward in both directions.

Wegener had proposed continental drift in 1912 and been dismissed for forty years, largely because he could not say what moved the continents. He died on the Greenland ice in 1930 without vindication. Hess supplied the mechanism, the magnetic stripes supplied the proof, and the whole of geology was rebuilt inside about a decade - one of the fastest wholesale reversals of scientific consensus on record.