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and agreed to do “everything possible to prevent the card from having a for-
midable aspect.”
153
In a bow to the legacy of the boosters, Byerly suggested
that there be a check box for “damage: none,” since “the loyal Californian
is very anxious to tell when no damage has been done and he should be
given the opportunity.”
154
Wood and Byerly also considered how to tar-
get the best observers. Byerly insisted that postmasters were more reliable
than schoolteachers, and he was not prepared to cede them to the Coast
Survey.
155
In April of 1928 the pair agreed on a division of California for
the purpose of earthquake investigations: the “Byerly-Wood line,” as their
colleagues called it, ran along the northern border of Santa Barbara County,
then curved north of Inyo Valley. For events near the border, they agreed to
“interchange telegrams before we decide who is to send out questionnaires
and go into the field.”156
156
though trained as a physicist rather than a geologist, Byerly generally
shared Wood's perspective on the field of seismology. Byerly complained
to Wood that he resented a “slighting reference to seismologists” from the
physicist Frank Wenner at the Bureau of Standards, who had lately been in
California working on the design of seismographs. “the idea that we are
ignorant of the elements of physics seems prevalent among a certain type
of physicists.” Byerly alluded to the ongoing dispute over the instrumental
equivalent of seismic intensity—whether the “violence” of the shock corre-
sponded to ground displacement, velocity, acceleration, or some combined
function of these variables. “We are not wed to displacement meters as they
seem to think. And our intellects are capable of comprehending even ac-
celeration. After all there have been a few things accomplished in this world
by men who did not bear the title of 'Physicist.'”
157
Wood tried to convince
Byerly not to take the matter personally: “You must not forget that your own
introduction to the subject [of seismology] was from the side of physics,
whereas more than nine in ten have entered the field from meteorology, or
geology, or astronomy, or scattering fields in which a thorough training in
dynamics is rare.”
158
Despite his training in physics, Byerly was unimpressed by mathematical
niceties. He felt his colleagues focused unduly on aspects of seismology that
were highly mathematical and often poorly understood: “It impresses them
far more than descriptions of what happened in the earthquake, which they
themselves might have observed if they had taken the trouble to go into the
field and look.”
159
Byerly has been aptly described as a philosophical prag-
matist. “Like William James,” a colleague recalled, “it amused him to shock
by insisting that truth must have a 'cash value.'”
160
Byerly's pragmatism led
him to a healthy skepticism about claims to precision in seismology. As
