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were taken as irreducible elements of knowledge of the whole. The epis-
temic model was one of translation. The goal was emphatically not to
reduce the observational reports to a single “language of nature,” as the
curves of self-registering instruments were often described in the nineteenth
century.
75
To a north American seismologist of this period it seemed self-
evident that “reliable seismograms furnish us the data for all our computa-
tions about an earthquake . . . in short, the seismograms give the story of
the earthquake, just as the spectrogram gives the story of the distant stars.”
76
For Mach, suess, and their colleagues, however, no seismogram could ever
tell the story of an earthquake—most basically, because the earth was not a
distant star. The goal was not to explain the earthquake in terms of a single
physical cause nor to reduce its description to a single variable. Instead, all
possible perspectives on an earthquake, like the multiple languages of the
empire, were in principle granted equal status. “Complete knowledge” of
an earthquake corresponded not to a mathematical law nor an instrumental
trace, but rather to a multilingual archive.
77
Yet Mach's epistemological fantasy hid the immense work of construct-
ing such an archive. The history of the imperial earthquake Commission
demonstrates, to the contrary, that translation was labor—and it was labor
that the earthquake Commission was at times unwilling to fund. viennese
seismologists were not even aware of the extent of the effort involved, since
linguistic equivalences were constructed primarily through discussions be-
tween the provincial reporters and local observers. For instance, the Ger-
man, Croatian, and Czech words
Getöse,
tutnjava,
and
rachot
became the
standard descriptions for the rumbling noises accompanying earthquakes,
rather than other possibilities in each language.
78
even less visible was the
subsequent work of translating the official results of the commission from
German into languages in which they were more likely to be read by po-
tential observers. Arguably, the invisibility of such labor is endemic in the
history of science.
79
By eliding the labor and politics of translation, Mach
contributed to the discipline's enduring tendency to view translation merely
as an epistemological metaphor.
80
