The Earthquake Observers

Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter

Deborah R. Coen

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226212050, 9780226111810
• eBook ISBN: 9780226111834
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet's hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordings of seismographs but also on the observations of eyewitnesses to destruction. During the nineteenth century, a scientific description of an earthquake was built of stories—stories from as many people in as many situations as possible. Sometimes their stories told of fear and devastation, sometimes of wonder and excitement.
           
In The Earthquake Observers, Deborah R. Coen acquaints readers not only with the century's most eloquent seismic commentators, including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Kraus, Ernst Mach, John Muir, and William James, but also with countless other citizen-observers, many of whom were women. Coen explains how observing networks transformed an instant of panic and confusion into a field for scientific research, turning earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of the physical and human sciences. Seismology abandoned this project of citizen science with the introduction of the Richter Scale in the 1930s, only to revive it in the twenty-first century in the face of new hazards and uncertainties. The Earthquake Observers tells the history of this interrupted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Kraus, “Das Erdbeben” (1908). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

2. To my chagrin, a week after completing this manuscript (23 August 2011), I mistook a rare East Coast tremor for the subway passing underground.

3. Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 120. In fact, “The earthquake metaphor is a veritable topos of the reception of Nietzsche” (Meyer, “Nietzsche und die klassische Moderne,” 13).

4. Exner, Der Schlichten Astronomia, 138.

5. Popper quoted in Dawson, “The Reception of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems,” 84; Menger, “The New Logic,” 336.

6. Dawson, “Reception of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.”

7. Schütz, Der Grubenhund, 37.

8. Voss, Symbolische Formen, 13.

9. De la Beche, How to Observe, 142. On representations of earthquakes, see Dombois, Über Erdbeben. Jamie Rae Bluestone’s excellent dissertation on pre-instrumental seismology, “Why the Earth Shakes,” came to my attention as I was completing this project.

10. Neumayr, Erdgeschichte, 305.

11. Isaac Esterbrock to Charles Rockwood, 10 August 1884, book 3, Rockwood Papers, Princeton University Archives.

12. Heim, Die Erdbeben und deren Beobachtung, 24.

13. Favre, “Tremblement de terre à Fleurier,” 132. Visual representations of earthquakes are another crucial source of information for historical seismologists today; see Kozák and Čermák, Illustrated History of Natural Disasters. On the divergence between scientific illustrations of earthquakes and artistic conventions in the late eighteenth century, see Keller, “Sections and Views.”

14. Fan, “‘Collective Monitoring’”; Valencius, “Accounts of the New Madrid Earthquakes.”

15. Palm and Carroll, Illusions of Safety.

16. Quervain, “Erdbeben der Schweiz 1910.”

17. Steinberg, Acts of God; Hoffman and Oliver-Smith, “Anthropology and the Angry Earth.” “Risk” is defined as “hazard” multiplied by “vulnerability,” where hazard is a natural condition and vulnerability is the probability of damage, given an event of a certain magnitude.

18. Stein, “Continental Intraplate Earthquake Issues,” 2; Fréchet et al., Historical Seismology; Valencius, “New Madrid Earthquakes.”

19. Hilhorst and Bankoff, introduction, 1.

20. Sarton, “Secret History,” 187.

21. Mauch, Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses, 7; Davids, “River Control”; Poliwoda, Aus Katastrophen Lernen.

22. Suess, Antlitz der Erde, 1:25.

23. Latour, Never Been Modern.

24. There was a delay of four weeks before the quake was reported in Hamburg and Berlin papers (Wilke, “Das Erdbeben von Lissabon als Medienereignis”).

25. Fischer, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, 151.

26. Kant, “Naturbeschreibung des Erdbebens,” 434.

27. Gerland, “Immanuel Kant.”

28. Fisher, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, 152; Benjamin, “Lisbon Earthquake,” 538. For a more sober assessment of the scientific significance of the Lisbon earthquake and of Kant’s research, see Oldroyd et al., “The Study of Earthquakes.”

29. Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology, 11.

30. Kant, Physische Geographie, vol. 1, part 1, 14.

31. Until the past few years, this tension tended to hold the field of history of science aloof from environmental history (Anker, “Environmental History versus the History of Science”). Doing environmental history seemed to preclude critical analysis of the construction of environmental knowledge. Recent work—in particular, by Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, and Linda Nash—has shown how to integrate the strong points of each field, and this book seeks to follow their examples.

32. Neumayr, Erdgeschichte, 305. On the Portuguese use of questionnaires to investigate the quake of 1755, see Oliveira, “1755 Lisbon Earthquake.”

33. Herbert, Victorian Relativity, 147.

34. Gerland, “Immanuel Kant,” 449.

35. White, “Darwin, Concepción.” On the naturalization of disaster, see Steinberg, Acts of God, and Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts.

36. Richter, “Instrumental Magnitude Scale”; Hough, Richter’s Scale; Goodstein, “Waves in the Earth”; Geschwind, California Earthquakes.

37. Barth, “Politics of Seismology.”

38. Other romantics pursued natural knowledge by scaling mountain peaks, cultivating somnambulism, sticking pins in their eyes, or even electrocuting themselves. See Strickland, “Ideology of Self-Knowledge”; Felsch, Laborlandschaften; Dettelbach, “Face of Nature.”

39. On nonexpert observers, see Vetter, ed., “Lay Participation”; Charvolin et al., Des sciences citoyennes?; on scientific observation more broadly, Daston and Lunbeck, Histories of Scientific Observation.

40. The reference is to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• ONE / The Human Seismograph
• TWO / The Planet in the Village: Comrie, Scotland, 1788–1897
• THREE / News of the Apocalypse
• FOUR / The Tongues of Seismology: Switzerland, 1855–1912
• FIVE / Geographies of Hazard
• SIX / The Moment of Danger
• SEVEN / Fault Lines and Borderlands: Imperial Austria, 1880–1914
• EIGHT / What Is the Earth?
• NINE / The Youngest Land: California, 1853–1906
• TEN / A True Measure of Violence: California, 1906–1935
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index