Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
lure to a luxurious holiday. Willis made them speak of alternative values: of
the romance of an undeveloped landscape, the wisdom of historical tradi-
tion, and the imperative of civic duty.
the wreckage of this charming town offered Willis an opportunity to
demonstrate the value of felt reports. Writing in the
BSSA
for a nonspecial-
ist audience, Willis called for “better methods of observing and recording
those shocks which are perceptible to our senses.”
138
He demonstrated what
could be learned from such observations. For instance, reports of shaking
from the mountains near the Santa Ynez fault indicated that the Mesa fault
was not the sole source of the shocks. A fortuitous piece of evidence came
from a civil engineer who happened to be driving down State Street (which
runs northwest from the coast) when he “felt a blow from behind as though
someone had run into the rear of his car.” Willis took this observation as
“definite evidence of an earthquake movement from the north or north-
west.”
139
Willis also offered his personal observations in great detail—per-
haps, considering the circumstances, excessive detail:
the writer was at the hotel Miramar, four and one-half miles east of Santa
Barbara. Lying awake, he heard, as it seemed, a train approaching along the
Southern Pacific tracks from the
east,
experienced such rapid vibrations as are
produced by a train close at hand, and then felt the sharp jolt of the advanc-
ing wave of an earthquake, it came from the
west.
He was thrown sidewise in
that direction. Recognizing the meaning of the shock, he noted the approxi-
mate time (6:44 a.m.) and began to count seconds. He had reached fifteen
when the movement stopped. In the meantime the bed was rotating in an
anti-clockwise direction with sufficient energy to cause him to put out his
hand to steady himself. Had the motion continued or increased materially in
violence it would have become alarming. As it was he and his friend dressed
without haste, taking nineteen minutes, and in that interval there occurred
six earthquake shocks including the first. Others followed, of course, but were
not specifically noted.
140
Willis did not note the gender of his “friend,” and one can only imagine
what Willis's wife thought upon reading this account. Whatever the circum-
stances were, however, Willis rose above them: he was the model of a cool,
composed scientific observer.
Daring to challenge the American image of seismology as a matter of in-
terest only to scientists, engineers, and businessmen, Willis set out to make
the field genuinely popular. “the science of seismology has in the past ex-
cited but little interest among laymen, as compared for instance with as-
