Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
What must Rockwood have felt as he filed this publicity away in his
scrapbook? no doubt it disturbed his colleagues too. A letter from Cleve-
land Abbe arrived on the nineteenth, containing two letters and two clip-
pings. Abbe hoped to receive information from Rockwood, but he had
heard that Rockwood was himself looking for reports. Something had to be
done, Abbe decided. “i have always hoped that our office [the Army Signal
Office] would pay more attention to Seismology but the present feeling is
that it is too far outside of our legal business. So probably it will be left to
the Geological Survey. However if as a private person i can help you to or-
ganize a general Seismological Association i shall be glad to do so. i will set
up a lot of pillars and balls in one corner of my cellar to begin with.” Abbe
mentioned two colleagues who had lived in Japan and were “interested ob-
servers” and another who had set up a rough seismometer at Harvard. “i
really think we can organize systematic records and observers in every Astro-
nomical observatory east of the Mississippi. Possibly the Appalachian Club
would undertake and study Appalachian Seismology.”
41
in mid-november, Powell, director of the Geological Survey, invited
Rockwood, Davis, Abbe, Paul, and Dutton to a meeting in Washington, all
expenses paid. “After looking over the ground pretty fully,” Powell thought
it would “be possible to inaugurate systematic observations, and it seems
that we ought first to give attention to the character of the observations most
desirable, the instruments to be used, etc.”
42
A press release announced
plans for a national seismic survey, to include a “large corps of observers”
reporting to local directors.
43
A report on the meeting in the
New York Herald
hoped that “the observers will not have a chance to make a single observa-
tion for half a century at least.”
44
Only one participant in the november 1884 meeting seems to have
taken any notice of the example of the Swiss earthquake Commission. in
Science
the following spring, Harvard's William Morris Davis judged the
Swiss far ahead of Americans in the study of earthquakes. Davis described
the commission's publications as “entertaining” and “attractive” and noted
with disappointment that they were not available in any American librar-
ies. He discussed the Rossi-Forel scale, the significance of the commission's
work for the tectonic theory of earthquakes, and its potential to clarify the
geological interpretation of the Alps.
45
Perhaps it was Davis who brought
Swiss seismology to Rockwood's attention. By January, Rockwood was in
correspondence with Albert Heim, who offered details on the Swiss system
and assured Rockwood that human observers had proved far more valu-
able than instruments.
46
But how could the United States adopt a research
method designed for a nation smaller in area than West Virginia?
