Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
hidden depths.
21
For gerland, making seismology “modern” meant mak-
ing it into an “observatory science.” Yet observatories themselves were
in flux circa 1900. Would observatories continue to anchor networks of
lay observers or rely only on experts? Would they maintain the lively ex-
change with field-based research that humboldt had inspired? Would
they endure as public spaces as well as scientific workplaces? As historians
have recently noted, the Observatoire de Paris and the Berliner Sternwarte
invited the nineteenth-century public to train telescopes on the heavens,
but their open-door policies were short-lived. Scientific observatories were
increasingly divided from public ones and tied to military and industrial
ambitions.
22
gerland's aspirations were embodied in Strasbourg's imperial Central
Station for Seismology. Unlike the stately facades of earlier observatories
that announced their public function, the imperial Central Station pre-
sented a squat, plain face of homely brick. Behind it was a state-of-the-art,
triple-walled design of iron-reinforced concrete. the three types of seismom-
eter—soon supplemented by five others—were steadied against nearby vi-
brations by pillars 2.3 meters deep and detached from the building itself.
23
in a self-conscious contrast with the older seismic observatories of italy or
Japan, gerland intended that in Strasbourg “local research would recede
before the great questions of the seismicity of the entire earth.”
24
gerland's version of seismology was only incidentally concerned with
the cataclysms that had been the science's subject matter since ancient times.
the threat that earthquakes posed to human communities was at most
marginal to his global seismology. Addressing a popular audience in 1898,
gerland insisted that seismology's goal must be pure rather than practical
knowledge: “Seismic research thus has no practical benefit. All prophecies,
even if now and then they seem to come true, are entirely groundless. All
that one can say for now is that some regions and eras are more given to
earthquakes, some soil types are more dangerous; and that certainly has no
practical use.”
25
here gerland went well beyond disputing the evidence for
the tectonic hypothesis. he dismissed outright all the work his colleagues
were doing to avert future disasters—the mapping of seismic intensity, the
location of fault lines, the study of architectural damage. to the german
public, gerland flatly denied that seismology was of any practical value at
all. its goal was purely intellectual: to fathom the physical world. it was,
he argued, an endeavor wholly in the tradition of Kant, who was drawn to
earth physics because of “the majesty and novelty of the task, the immensity
of the vision.”
26
ensconced in his windowless, climate-controlled fortress,
