Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Mallet's disdain for the “gossip” of human observers was echoed by
many British, Italian, and Japanese contributors to seismology in the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century. When the Italian earthquake Commis-
sion was established in 1883, it focused on constructing seismographic
observatories, not a permanent network of observers.
12
This was in keep-
ing with the move to exclude amateur observers from Italian astronomy in
the aftermath of national unification.13
13
The private network developed by
Count Michele Stefano de Rossi in the 1870s consisted entirely of fellow
gentlemen-naturalists, nearly half of whom owned seismoscopes or seis-
mographs.
14
In Japan, where John Milne and Fusakichi omori pioneered
instrumental seismology in the 1880s and 1890s, lay observers played little
role in earthquake investigations. Milne seems to have given up on the col-
lection of felt reports after his investigation of the Yokohama earthquake of
1880, for which he sent out five hundred questionnaires and received only
twenty-six responses.
15
A leading British seismologist speculated that such
outreach efforts failed in Japan in part because Japanese earthquakes were
so frequent. “The detailed inquiries which are possible in Great Britain can
hardly be made in a country in which the recollection of one shock is soon
after dimmed or erased by the occurrence of another or many more in rapid
succession.”
16
As Milne put it, the Japanese chatted about earthquakes the
way the english chatted about the weather.
17
In any case, he had little pa-
tience for the analysis of felt reports: “Attempts to find out what sensations
were experienced by the people at the time of the shock are unsatisfactory.
People questioned will tell trivial circumstances—how they tumbled from
the top to the bottom of the stairs whilst hurrying to get out of doors—
girls tell how they began to cry, etc.”
18
Likewise, many of Japan's historical
sources on earthquakes were judged by Westerners to be “of a trivial charac-
ter”—illustrated, for instance, by a 1707 account of a young man drinking
with friends in a teahouse when an earthquake knocked him down a ladder
into a barrel of pickled radishes.
19
It was, therefore, against his better judgment that Mallet began to collect
witnesses' descriptions of the sounds accompanying the Italian tremors. He
warned his reader that reports of sounds, unlike the hard evidence of archi-
tectural damage, were compromised by numerous distortions: “echoes, the
disturbance of local noises at the moment, the uncertainty with which the
ear judges of direction and sound, the evanescence of the phenomenon,
and the difficulties inseparable from trusting to merely collected informa-
tion of often incompetent observers, or unfaithful narrators, who observed
under alarm, must ever deprive sound phenomena (except when heard by
the physicist himself ) of the unerring certainty of deduction, that belongs
