Proc. IDNDR Inti. Symp. on Earthq. Disaster Reduction Techno/.

-30thAnniv. ofliSEE, Tsukuba.Japan (1992) pp.3-13.

A History of Earthquake Engineering

D. E. Hudson
Professor Emeritus
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, California 91125, USA

SUMMARY
This review will be restricted to those aspects of earthquake engineering
that involve the application of quantitative scientific principles to the
determination of the response of real structures to strong earthquake ground
motion. We begin with early efforts to ascertain the true ground motion
associated with destructive earthquakes, and continue with the development
of structural dynamic theory to the point at which the behavior of complex
civil engineering structures to complicated transient loads can be calculated.
The first attempt to define a quantitative earthquake intensity scale
that assigns numbers to specific earthquake effects on people and on structures was in the early 1800's. The first effort to relate such earthquake
intensities to a physical quantity, peak ground acceleration, did not occur
until the late 1880's, some fifty years before the direct measurement of
strong earthquake ground motions. Practical seismographs first appeared in
the 1880's, but these were sensitive long period devices not suitable for
measuring destructive ground motion. It was not until the early 1930's that
the strong motion accelerograph was developed, and in 1933 the first accurate
measurement of destructive earthquake ground motion was obtained during the
Long Beach, California earthquake.
By the middle of the 1800's, the field of analytical mechanics had
progressed to the point that in theory the response of a structure of any
complexity to a prescribed earthquake excitation could be solved. In the
1930's such theory was applied to the earthquake problem, and during the next
twenty years the rapid development of modern computing techniques made it
possible to carry out numerical solutions to practical problems. During this
same time, methods for displaying the frequency characteristics of earthquake
ground motions developed into response spectrum theory, which has remained
as an important tool in modern earthquake engineering. By the 1960's the
availability of a large number of accelerograms from earthquakes of many
different types and sizes made it possible to portray with reasonable
accuracy the essential features of earthquake excitation as a basis for
earthquake resistant design.
KEY WORDS: Earthquakes, Seismology, Earthquake Engineering, Ground Motion
Measurement, Structural Dynamics

1.

INTRODUCTION

Earthquake engineering is at once a very old and a very new subject. A

3000-year history of earthquakes in China testifies to an ancient concern for
the subject, and there is evidence that conscious attempts to improve the

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