Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
nervous people, especially women, feel earthquakes much better than I
do.”
78
His degree 2 therefore specified “felt by many sensitive and ner-
vous people.” Looking back on thirty years of the Earthquake Commission's
activity, one director noted, “Very interesting is the physiological fact that
certain individuals of both sexes have an almost astonishing sensitivity for
ground movements—[they] represent real seismoscopes.”
79
A quiet, house-
bound lifestyle and close attention to the arrangement of domestic objects
put many bourgeois women in an excellent position to detect tremors.
Already in the first years of the commission's work, it was becoming
clear that the typical conditions of scholarly production were not the most
favorable to earthquake observing. Attentive watching and listening seemed
of secondary importance. More earthquakes tended to be reported at night
than during the day.
80
Though some events were certainly missed by those
asleep, people at rest—even if half-conscious—were more likely to feel the
earth move than people in motion. Scholars who spent most of their days
indoors were more likely to notice a slight tremor by means of an object's
shift in position; but those who worked outdoors could more reliably report
the direction of shaking, being free of the distorting effects of human con-
structions. In one vivid example of these paradoxes, a young mother sent
in a report with observations made by herself and her two sons. It was the
younger boy, playing on the floor with his toy soldiers when the earthquake
struck, who “saw his little cardboard soldiers fall before him while saluting
the Duke of Brunswick!” As a statue of the duke of Brunswick stood just to
the south of the family's home in Geneva, the local commission member
commented that the “fall of the little soldiers . . . seems to demonstrate this
direction.”
81
With no hint of amusement, the commission deemed the little
boy's observation the best of the lot.
Building an Archive
Historians of science have just begun to explore historical developments in
the methods of recording and storing information about natural environ-
ments in flux. This is, in part, a history of genres, including local natural
histories and commonplace topics in the seventeenth century; personal
weather diaries in the eighteenth; the catalogs of botanical gardens, zoo-
logical museums, and synchronized global observing networks in the nine-
teenth; and the emergence of computerized databases in the late twentieth.
82
Switzerland's macroseismological network straddled two stages of this his-
tory, helping to transform methods of individual, local observation into
geographically widespread, collective practices. Conscious of the challenge
