Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
3, for instance, was “strong enough that the duration or direction could be
appreciated.” only a shock of degree 6 would produce an “
apparent
shaking
of trees and bushes.” These phrases hinted at the mindfulness expected of
witnesses. Inherent in the scale itself was thus the dual status of earthquake
observers as experimental subjects and amateur naturalists.
Geography, according to forel, was interested in “the reactions they
[people] have to the environment in which they are immersed and which
they produce on this environment.” The same could be said for seismology.
Details and idiosyncrasies of ordinary people's responses were recorded,
remarked on, and preserved. An analogous approach could be found in the
field of “cosmic physics” in late nineteenth-century central Europe. Phe-
nomena like atmospheric electricity and the mountain wind called
föhn
were analyzed according to new theories of microphysics or hydrodynamics
but also, in an ecological vein, as phenomena that shaped and were shaped
by particular places. In all these cases, human reactions were part of a ho-
listic understanding of the physical process. Thus
föhn
could trigger heart
failure or even criminal behavior; atmospheric electricity could aggravate
epidemics of cholera and influenza. A similar perspective underwrote the
commission's commitment to using human observers alongside improved
seismographs. As the commission's director put it in 1910, “To study the
relationship of man to earthquakes was from the start a special goal of Swiss
earthquake research.”
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“Real Seismoscopes”
As the Swiss public was learning to observe earthquakes, an unusual picture
was emerging of the scientific observer. By the late nineteenth century, sci-
entific observation was typically associated with a self-effacing, sober, emo-
tionally disengaged expert, by default male.
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Some earthquake observers
fit this description. for instance, a professor of physics in Mélan described
how he had observed a tremor: “I was in the garden occupied with ther-
mometric observations; I was watching a hair-hygrometer, and I saw with
astonishment that its needle had convulsive movements, which I had never
noticed to the same degree. Suddenly I heard an underground thunder, then
I felt myself falter a little.”
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Certainly, there were observers who regularly
engaged in other forms of scientific observation and happened to have a
sensitive instrument at hand when an earthquake struck. In general, though,
successful earthquake observers were a motley group. Interestingly, women
were thought to excel. As the Italian seismologist Mercalli remarked when
proposing his revisions to the rossi-forel scale in 1902, “very sensitive and
