Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
seismology into the twentieth century. in imperial Austria, the arguments
for and against the centralization of the earth sciences resulted in an effec-
tive compromise, a system balanced between the intimacy of local natural
history and the efficiency of a central bureaucracy. in the United States, the
result of analogous tensions was a shiftless path from one form of organiza-
tion to another. More than elsewhere, the initiative to record earthquakes
came from individual scientists, and the quirks of personality set the limits
of communication between scientists and citizens.
Before the Civil War, a successful network of weather observers had
threaded across the United States from Massachusetts to Missouri. it had
been built in the 1850s by Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian institution
and had depended to a large degree on amateur “cooperative observers.”
As Jim Fleming has documented, the composition of this corps shifted in
the 1850s and 1860s to include fewer professors and more farmworkers.
31
Weather observing was on its way to becoming a grassroots enterprise.
However, the Civil War unraveled much of this network. Telegraphic con-
nections were broken or overloaded with military messages, and observers
were drafted into the army. The reconstruction of the observing system be-
gan in 1870, when Congress passed a bill establishing telegraphic weather
forecasting under the auspices of the Army Signal Service. The lawmakers
were convinced that military discipline was essential to a proper routine of
meteorological observation. So too, however, was civilian expertise, and the
new weather service was fortunate to recruit Cleveland Abbe, an astrono-
mer who had established a regional telegraphic observing network out of
Cincinnati in 1869.
Abbe later claimed that he had hoped from the start to include the re-
porting of earthquakes in the weather service's agenda. That plan was ap-
parently foiled by political resistance to the further expansion of the Signal
Service.
32
As the acting chief of the Signal Service explained in 1887, “the
data received at this office is so voluminous and recent regulations of the
War Department relative to printing so restrictive, that the late Chief Sig-
nal Officer [Albert Meyer, d. 1880] ordered no further publication by this
bureau of earthquake information, as it was thought that such publication
might give ground for the charge that it was interfering in work not legally
within its proper sphere.” The acting chief did “not deem himself autho-
rized to make any definite change at present.”
33
in the absence of federal
support, the compilation of data on American earthquakes was undertaken
at the private initiative of Charles Rockwood of Princeton (chapter 3).
When a temblor took the eastern Seaboard by surprise on 10 August
1884, Rockwood was able to collect observations from eleven states. Recent
