Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
struck when most residents were still sleeping. the scientists in charge of the
investigation complained, “So few people were awake at the time the shock
began that but a small proportion of the replies come from people who
were in full possession of their observational faculties at the beginning of
the disturbance; and of those who were suddenly and rudely awakened, few
were sufficiently alert for deliberate perception at the time and had to rely
upon a somewhat confused memory for the character of the shock.”
12
And
yet, accounts of the earthquake are remarkable precisely for their character
of “deliberate perception.”
Several scientists were immediately alert. Grove Karl Gilbert, for one,
counted himself lucky to have witnessed the temblor:
It had been my fortune to experience only a single weak tremor, and I had,
moreover, been tantalized by narrowly missing the great Inyo earthquake of
1872 and the Alaska earthquake of 1899. When, therefore, I was awakened in
Berkeley on the eighteenth of April last by a tumult of motions and noises, it
was with unalloyed pleasure that I became aware that a vigorous earthquake
was in progress. the creaking of the building, which has a heavy frame of
redwood, and the rattling of various articles of furniture so occupied my at-
tention that I did not fully differentiate the noises peculiar to the earthquake
itself. the motions I was able to analyze more successfully, perceiving that,
while they had many directions, the dominant factor was a swaying.
13
the astronomer A. O. Leuschner was no less precise in his report. His es-
timate of the duration of the shaking was, improbably, “based on count-
ing seconds while carrying my small children out of the house.” Leuschner
counted seventy-five seconds, but feared he could have overestimated by
ten, it being “safe to assume that I counted seconds too rapidly in the excite-
ment of the moment.”
14
today, it is easy to poke fun at the “pedantic precision” of these observ-
ers.
15
Such jokes made the rounds in 1906 as well. At Stanford, the statue of
America's first great naturalist, Louis Agassiz, was thrown headfirst from atop
a column of the zoology building. “Many stories were told about Agassiz's
natural instinct that when the earthquake came he decided to stick his head
underground to find out what was going on in the earth below and with his
finger pointing saying, 'Hark! Listen!'” But to mock Agassiz's living counter-
parts is to miss the ways in which the earthquake called into question what
it meant to observe an earthquake scientifically. (See figure 10.1.)
no one had worked harder in this vein than Alexander McAdie, chief
of the San Francisco Weather Bureau. the
San Francisco Chronicle
reported
