The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter - Softcover

Coen, Deborah R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022621205X ISBN 13: 9780226212050

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2014

Synopsis

Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet’s hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordings of seismographs but also on the observations of eyewitnesses to destruction. During the nineteenth century, a scientific description of an earthquake was built of stories—stories from as many people in as many situations as possible. Sometimes their stories told of fear and devastation, sometimes of wonder and excitement.

In The Earthquake Observers, Deborah R. Coen acquaints readers not only with the century’s most eloquent seismic commentators, including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Kraus, Ernst Mach, John Muir, and William James, but also with countless other citizen-observers, many of whom were women. Coen explains how observing networks transformed an instant of panic and confusion into a field for scientific research, turning earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of the physical and human sciences. Seismology abandoned this project of citizen science with the introduction of the Richter Scale in the 1930s, only to revive it in the twenty-first century in the face of new hazards and uncertainties. The Earthquake Observers tells the history of this interrupted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk.

About this title

About the Author:

Deborah R. Coen is professor of history at Yale University. She is the author of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review:

“Crowd-sourced science has rarely been so thrilling. As Deborah R. Coen reveals, the rumbustious history of seismology began with roving scientists gathering locals’ accounts of shocks, shudders and thumps. Luminaries from Charles Darwin to Alexander von Humboldt reported, too; Charles Dickens likened a quake to a great beast ‘shaking itself and trying to rise.' Coen argues for a hybridized ‘disaster science,' factoring in such responses from ‘human seismographs’ with geology and instrumental data.” (Nature)

“The cleverly ambiguous title of this book plays with the many uncertainties that surround our experience of earthquakes. Just who are these ‘observers’: are they scientists, farmers, or city dwellers? In answering this question, Deborah Coen offers a wealth of information in a book that reads with the appeal of fiction. In ten chapters, from “The Human Seismograph” to “A True Measure of Violence: California 1906–1935”, she spins a compelling yarn of how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientists gathered accounts by observers of seismic events that could furnish quantifiable information.” (Luciana Astiz, University of California, San Diego Times Higher Education)

“The book is well written, the documentation meticulous, and the depth of research impressive. At many points in the narrative, I marveled at the extent of the relevant material Coen has unearthed. . . . [F]ascinating.” (Gregory C. Beroza Science)

“Scholarly and well-written. . . . Highly recommended for both library and private purchase. Deborah Coen is to be congratulated for producing a first class introduction to a much-neglected theme within the history of earthquake science which should appeal, not only to seismologists, but also to historians of science and the hazard research community more generally. This is a successful volume by a highly talented academic writer.” (David K. Chester, University of Liverpool Environment and History)

“A fascinating multisited study of the changing nature of material and human instruments through which communities have understood modern disasters.” (Carla Nappi New Books in Science, Technology, and Society)

“The superb writing in this book is engaging and outstanding for its insight into the human reaction to environmental disturbances. Highly recommended.” (T. L. T. Grose, Colorado School of Mines Choice)

“[L]ively. . . . Deborah Coen has offered us an interesting story about how earthquakes affect ordinary people and how their observations were the basis of the early stages of seismology. . . . Coen’s book can help us to consider these human aspects of earthquakes, often forgotten by seismologists.” (Metascience)

“The Earthquake Observers is a forceful, well written, and on the whole persuasive—dare I say it, groundbreaking—attempt to inject the importance of eyewitness reports into the history of seismology, chiefly during the 19th and early 20th centuries, concluding with the invention of Richter’s magnitude scale.” (Andrew Robinson Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Coen’s important and original new book is a welcome contribution from a scholar capable of showing the deep historical contingencies involved in the early history of seismology, a key modern disaster science at the center of contemporary disaster preparedness.” (Scott Gabriel Knowles, Drexel University American Historical Review)

“Deborah R. Coen brings to vivid life the human seismographic networks in four different countries, whose members were a principal source of data about earthquakes before the 1930s. She treats her subject with a capacious interpretive vision, revealing that, in relying on human reports, early earthquake science encompassed not just the measurable movements of the earth but also the human experience of the unsteady ground, including fear and terror. This is a stunningly original work, at once an eye-opening history and an implicit guide to how we might advantageously approach contemporaneous threats of disasters.”
(Daniel J. Kevles, Yale University)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 022621205X
• ISBN 13: 9780226212050
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360