Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
surveys on a smaller scale, drawing on a network of approximately two hun-
dred volunteer observers. this research received little support from the di-
rector of the Geological Survey at the time, Patrick willmore, a seismometer
designer who “had little time for Dollar.” In 1974, Chris Browitt reinstated
macroseismic surveys at the Geological Survey, “in the teeth of objections”
from willmore.
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willmore reflected the direction seismology was taking in the twentieth
century, in Britain and beyond. Davison's colleague John Milne returned
to Britain in 1895, after two decades in Japan. Milne immediately began to
campaign for government support for his project of a worldwide seismo-
graphic network. Milne promoted seismology as a science appropriate to
the British Empire in the new century. For instance, he repeatedly stressed
the need to safeguard Britain's global web of telegraph cables by monitor-
ing submarine seisms. In the wake of the Hereford quake, Milne seized the
opportunity to argue for the necessity of seismometric studies even for local
research. As he put it in a letter to the
Times,
“At this particular time many
may well ask whether in the Severn valley or in any other part of Britain,
shiverings to which we are insensible are now in progress, whilst the thou-
sands who are awakened every night may desire to know whether the causes
have been fanciful or real. Until we establish seismographs, especially in
suspected districts, the answers to these and other questions are in abey-
ance.”
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Next to Milne's high-tech planetary science, Davison's provincial
inquiries appeared downright quaint.
The Seismic Goose and the Psychic Gander
In the last years of the nineteenth century, the human observation of earth-
quakes lost whatever dignity it had retained in Britain up to 1884. Seis-
mology became known to the British public as a professional science that
measured far-off vibrations with exquisitely sensitive instruments. “British
earthquakes,” meanwhile, became little more than a punch line. the village
of Comrie was the butt of most of the jokes. An 1886 article in a Scottish
paper reminded readers of the “extinct volcanoes that thirty years ago used
to flourish in the Perthshire village of Comrie. the story went that they were
got up by the local correspondent. As long as he was in settled employment,
Comrie was quiet; but the moment the necessities of his life perceived shin-
ing merits in penny-a-lining, at once the earthquake appeared. It thus fell
out that the newspaper reader was getting his shocks three or four times in
the year in obedience to the fanciful wit and the domestic exigencies of the
local correspondent. the story may itself have been fanciful; but the fact
