Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
“Cooperatives”
What American seismology needed was a widely distributed corps of dedi-
cated, attentive, and accurate observers: precisely what the US Weather Bu-
reau could offer. The population of lay weather observers in the United
States was more heterogeneous than in Switzerland and Austria. its ranks
included physicians, teachers, and clergymen, but also a significant propor-
tion of storekeepers and farmers.
47
Many were women who took over the
work of observing from their fathers or husbands, either temporarily during
an absence or permanently following a death. indeed, the task was more
often assumed by daughters than by sons.
48
As in europe, the cooperative
observers were unpaid,
49
and their lack of compensation was taken as a guar-
antee of their trustworthiness. The bureau's weather records were accepted
as evidence in law courts and were often used to plan major engineering
projects. This meant that a great burden of trust rested on the shoulders of
the volunteer observers. The bureau's meteorologist in Salt Lake City argued
that the system was self-correcting. Only an observer who took pleasure in
the work would stick with it, and “we cannot conceive of anyone finding a
pleasure in a service that is carelessly done.” “Unreliable” observers, he con-
cluded, “find the work too objectionable to be continued long.” Moreover,
if the saying was true that “a bad workman quarrels with his tools,” then the
preservation of delicate measuring instruments was evidence of the qual-
ity of the observers.
50
instruments, however, were not necessarily essential.
it was not always the case that the bureau used instruments to inculcate
bureaucratic discipline.
51
“non-instrumental observations form the ground
work” in meteorology, according to Gustavus Hinrichs, director of the iowa
Weather Service. “Hence we would also urge all those who take notice of
special phenomena to report the same to us, as casual correspondents, de-
scribing the phenomena seen and stating time and place of the observa-
tion.”
52
Seismic tremors were among the phenomena that observers were
encouraged to register with their bare senses.
Based on a case study of the bureau's observers in Kansas at the turn
of the twentieth century, Jeremy Vetter has recently come to the intriguing
conclusion that the bureau succeeded only to the extent that it imposed
a “rigorously bureaucratic form of top-down control over knowledge pro-
duction.”
53
By contrast, Jamie Pietruska argues in a forthcoming topic that
scientific and vernacular methods of prediction were mutually constitutive
in the work of the Weather Bureau, producing a science that acknowledged
the limits to its own certainty.
54
Consistent with Pietruska's conclusion
about the mutual construction of scientific and vernacular knowledge, i have
