Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
earthquakes figured prominently, for example, in the manifestos of
Charles Fort, one of the most celebrated skeptics of twentieth-century sci-
ence. His followers in the International Fortean organization continue to
this day to hold annual conferences devoted to “anomalous phenomena.”
Fort's first major publication,
The Book of the Damned
(1919), was “a proces-
sion of data that Science has excluded.” “Damned,” in Fort's vocabulary,
meant rejected by “Dogmatic Science.” Fort wrote in an absurdist style that
lurched between bombastic pronouncements and nuggets of humble com-
mon sense. Among the “damned” were correlations he uncovered between
earthquakes and astronomical phenomena. To collect these “lost souls,”
he mined the reams of earthquake catalogs and observational reports
published in scientific journals since the late eighteenth century. He was
also a zealous collector of newspaper clippings—but then, so was any self-
respecting seismologist circa 1900. The research process he described would
have been familiar to any of them: “I have gone into the outer darkness of
scientific transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with
the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back
with the quasi-souls of lost data.”
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earthquakes suited Fort's hunt for “the
damned” precisely because of the minor explosion of seismological obser-
vations in the nineteenth century.
The First Seismographs
Seismology's credibility hinged on the design of instruments to measure
physical phenomena independently of their human impacts—to comple-
ment, not replace, the observations of human witnesses. While seismo-
scopes had been used since ancient times in China, modern european efforts
to build them began in earnest in Italy in the late eighteenth century.
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An
eighteenth-century seismoscope consisted of a hanging pendulum attached
to a stylus that made a mark when set in oscillation. not until the 1840s were
seismoscopes capable, in principle, of measuring the displacement of the
ground during a tremor. In practice, they often did not work. The inverted-
pendulum seismoscopes installed during an earthquake swarm in Comrie,
Scotland, in the 1840s were state of the art. Yet residents of Comrie counted
sixty shocks in one year, while the seismoscopes only recorded three. More
useful instruments were developed by British engineers in Japan in the
1880s. These “seismographs” were able to trace the development of earth-
quake waves over time. They recorded pendulum movements on a revolving
drum attached to a clockwork mechanism, producing a curve from which
