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James C. Williams
for the University of California. For almost three years, they designed
and constructed multi-storied buildings in San Francisco and Ber-
keley as well as the university's library building and Boalt Hall of
Law. Their winning alliance may well have stemmed from Howard's
previous experience in a successful partnership with New York civil
engineer Samuel M. Caldwell plus Galloway's earlier work for
architects. Additionally, Galloway's ego never was wrapped up in
earthquake engineering; he always considered hydroelectric power
and irrigation development his most important work.^*^
In the end, the property owners and investors continued to go to
architects for building design and construction. From the general
public's perspective engineers had no particular role to play in the
business. When people praised a building's appearance, the inevi-
table and obvious question was: 'Who was the architect?' William
Hamilton Hall regretted this but understood it:
'The architect's part of the result is visible - the style,
proportions, details and groupings, the selection of materials
and adaptation of parts, the special features and general ar-
rangement to the intended use. These are open to view and to
commendation or to criticism after the structure is finished. The
engineer's part is invisible. Hid below the ground or encased in
the shell and finish are the structural members - the bones,
cartilages and muscles, so to speak - of the great thing we call a
first class building.'
Of course, he added, 'If these are not all right [the building] may
tumble down some day'. This reality sparked the sense of social
responsibility that, despite the invisibility of their work, motivated
those engineers choosing to nurture the field of earthquake
engineering.^"
In California, earthquake engineering gains resulting from the
San Francisco tremor evaporated almost as quickly as they were
gotten. Even before rebuilding began, the powerful Southern Pacific
Company undertook a campaign denying that the earthquake had
caused the city's disaster. Panic selling on the New York Stock
Exchange drove down the value of the railroad's stock, significantly
endangering its borrowing power. With massive bonded
indebtedness, spending huge amounts of money at that moment to
contain the worst flood ever of the Colorado River, and confronted
with formidable earthquake damage repairs, the Southern Pacific,
according to San Francisco earthquake historians Gladys Hansen and
Emmet Condon, could not afford 'long-term losses of revenue that
180 Earthquake Engineering
Dewell, Naito's own design work and his analyses of damage in the
Tokyo earthquake 'had a profound influence on structural design in
California and elsewhere'. He was the first to design buildings so that
horizontal force was distributed among structural elements in pro-
portion to wall areas or column spacing. He initiated practical
determination of relative wall, partition, and structural frame
rigidities. He illuminated 'the importance of a symmetrical
arrangement of resisting units'. All of these became fundamental
principles in aseismic design.^'^
The 1925 tremor that jolted California's coastal city of Santa
Barbara further stimulated efforts in seismic research revitalised by
the Kanto earthquake. Stanford University, for example, improved its
research program by installing a large shaking table. More important,
however, the Santa Barbara tremor aroused support for earthquake
engineering within the state's business community and among
goverrmient officials. Unlike the aftermath of the San Francisco
earthquake, there was no denial of disaster. In fact the Southern
Pacific Company, leader in the campaign to cover-up the impact of
the 1906 tremor, openly admitted the damage it suffered in 1925 and
praised the 'resourcefulness of the men upon whom fell the burden
of keeping the railroad running'. In September, the Commonwealth
Club, which its drew members from the business and professional
community, adopted a resolution that recognised the inevitability of
recurring earthquakes and urged the city to again revise its building
code and strictly enforce it. Across California, government felt
pressure from business interests and citizens. Planners of great
bridges and timnels across San Francisco Bay approached the
Seismological Society of America to help them locate earthquake
faults. The self-interest of the business community no longer rested
in concealing the danger of earthquakes; government no longer
could afford to not take action to safeguard their citizens against
future earthquake danger. Prevention of financial loss - and with it
loss of property and human life - became paramount. Business and
government leaders moved forward on two fronts, discovering in
each that they could make little progress without drawing on and
supporting the field of earthquake engineering.^
Prior to the 1920s, earthquake insurance was written almost
exclusively as a side line on fire insurance. In 1921, only $13,617 in
premiums for earthquake insurance per se were paid in the United
States; over 90 per cent of these policies were on CaUfornia
properties. In the year of the Kanto earthquake, however, premiums
paid on California properties jumped to $213,707. Although this
184 Earthquake Engineering
out that there were 'two schools of thought... [about] seismic design
of buildings. One held to the principle of rigidity combined with
strength as the essential factor; the other held that sufficient strength
and rigidity were difficult to attain, were unnecessarily expensive,
and that flexibility was not only an essential but also reduced the
amoimt of strength necessary to resist earthquake shock'. Those
favouring flexibility advocated making the first story of multi-storied
building 'so flexible in relation to the stiffness of the stories above
that the earthquake motion would be there absorbed'. It was not
discovered until the 1930s that a multi-storied building's first story is
usually more flexible than the upper stories anyway.^
Another issue that faced officials was how to effectively express
design requirements in building codes. Following the San Francisco
earthquake, engineers believed that a building designed for a heavy
wind shear also would resist earthquakes. Yet, as Japanese civil
engineer L. H. Nishkian noted in 1927, the two forces were
fundamentally different - one limited in magnitude and applied only
above ground, the other unlimited in magnitude and applied
underground. After the 1908 Messina earthquake, Italians developed
a quantitative seismic code that expressed lateral force acceleration as
a percentage of acceleration due to gravity — buildings had to
withstand a lateral acceleration of 8% g. Following the 1923 Kanto
earthquake the Japanese Home Office followed suit, adopting a
seismic coefficient of 10% g. In 1925 authors of the 'Palo Alto Code' as
well as designers of the Pacific Coast Building Officials proposed
code also embraced it. Agreement on exactly what the coefficient
should be and what variables should go into it, however, proved
more difficult, particularly since earthquake ground accelerations
had never been recorded. Although, engineers needed and wanted
such information, seismologists apparently either had not been
particularly interested in it or had been imsuccessful in designing
instruments to measure it.'^
In 1929, John R. Freeman, past president of the ASCE and
American Society of Mechanical Engineers as well as president of the
non-profit Manufacturers Mutual Fire Insurance Company, attended
the Tokyo World Engineering Congress. Now in his mid-seventies he
had, during the course of his career, developed an interest in
earthquakes. He had served on California's 1906 State Earthquake
Investigation Commission, worked on Pacific Coast building
projects, served on three commissions studying engineering issues
surrounding construction of the Panama Canal, and seen
earthquakes as an insurance problem. In Tokyo he met Cal Tech's R.
James C. Williams 187
NOTES
1. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 324, The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of April 18,
1906 and Their Effects on Structures and Structural Materials, Washington, D.C. 1907,
14. The best general account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is Gladys Hansen
and Emmet Condon, Denial of Disaster (San Francisco, 1989).
2. James Dewey and Perry Byerly, 'The Early History of Seismometry (to 1900)',
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 1969, 59: 183-227; G. W. Housner,
Tiistorical View of Earthquake Engineering', Proceedings of the Eighth World
Conference on Earthquake Engineering, Post-Conference Volume (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1986), 27-9. A good example of a late-nineteenth century book about earthquakes is
Arnold Boscotwitz, Earthquakes (trans. C. B. Pitman) (London, 1890).
3. Ibid., 29; Dewey and Byerly, op. cit. (2), 195-211. Professor Fusakichi Omori, who led
Japanese efforts in seismology, let the society's journal expire after Milne departed.
Henry D. Dewell, 'Progress of Earthquake-Resistant Design', Civil Engineering,
1939, 9:601-604, has divided development of earthquake engineering into four
periods: 1880-1906 (formation of the Japanese society to the San Francisco
earthquake), 1906-1923 (Tokyo earthquake) or 1925 (Santa Barbara earthquake), 1923
or 1925-1933 (Long Beach earthquake), and 1933-the present (publication of his
article in 1939). I generally concur with Dewell but push back the first period, end
the second with 1923, extend the fourth to 1956 (year of the first World Conference
on Earthquake Engineering), and suggest a contemporary period from that date.
For a sense of issues and resources in seismology, see Edward P Hollis, Bibliography
of Engineering Seismology (2nd ed., Berkeley, 1958).
4. California, State Earthquake Investigation Commission, The California Earthquake of
April 18, 1906 (Washington, D.C., 1908), l:vii-viii and 434-451; Michael L. Smith,
Pacific Visions: California Scientists and the Environment, 1850-1915 (New Haven, 1987),
64. Clarence Edward Dutton was perhaps the first American to write a general text
on earthquakes: Earthquakes in the Light of the New Seismology (London, 1904).
5. Hansen and Condon, op. cit. (1), 8-11 and 64; U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin, op. cit.
(1), 112-114 and 149-150; Joint Committee on Lateral Forces, San Francisco Section,
American Society of Civil Engineers, and Structural Engineers Association of North
James C. Williams 191
California Earthquake of 1906', in David Starr Jordan (ed.) The California Earthquake
of 1906 (San Francisco, 1907), 304. Hansen and Condon, op. cit. (1), 121, note that San
Francisco remained an active laboratory for earthquake study for at least three
years.
12. Hall, op. cit. (11), 22.
13. Report of the General Committee, op. cit. (9), 234 and 235-236. Charles Derleth, Jr.,
who served on the committee, elaborated on the committee's conclusions in
'Destructive Extent of the California Earthquake' in Jordan, op. cit. (11), 119-212. Also
see U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin, op. cit. (1), 71-76 and 142-145; and the May and
June 1906 issues of The Architect and Engineer of California for a number of articles in
which engineers and architects suggest these sorts of structural lessons from the
earthquake.
14. Hansen and Condon, op. cit. (1), 14-15 and 107-127.
15. Report of the General Committee, op. cit. (9), 225 and 236; Brunnier, op. cit. (8), 26-2;
'Brick Well Laid is All Right', The Architect and Engineer of California, 1906, 5:n.p.
16. Snyder, op. cit. (5), 283-284. Also see 'Brickmakers' Opposition to Re-enforced
Concrete', The Architect and Engineer of California, 1906, 5:68; Hansen and Condon,
op. cit. (1), 110-111.
17. 'The New Building Ordinances', The Architect and Engineer of California, 1906, 5: 70;
William Hamilton Hall, 'The Rebuilding of San Francisco-Reinforced Concrete
Buildings', The Architect and Engineer of California, 1907,9:61-67.
18. 'The New Building Ordinances', The Architect and Engineer of California, 1906, 5: 70;
William Hamilton Hall, 'The Rebuilding of San Francisco-Reinforced Concrete
Buildings', The Architect and Engineer of California, 1907, 9: 61-67.
19. John Debo Galloway papers, MS 71-826, No. 1, Water Resources Archive, University
of California, Berkeley; Report of the General Committee, op. cit. (9), 210; 'In
Memoriam: John D. Galloway', California Historical Society Quarterly, 1943, 22:187;
Loren W. Partridge, John Galen Howard and the Berkeley Campus: Beaux-Arts
Architecture in the Athens of the West' (Berkeley, 1978). Hall, op. cit. (17), 62, observed
that 'the architects most prominent before the public by reason of the notable
buildings with which their names have in the past been connected, are not
prominent as the architects of reinforced concrete buildings'.
The St. Francis Hotel and Shreve building stand today. During his partnership
with Howard, Galloway chaired the local ASCE members special committee on Fire
and Earthquake Damage to Buildings, was an active member of Committee of
Forty's subcommittee revising San Francisco's building laws, and served as mentor
to two young civil engineers-Walter L. Huber and Henry D. Dewell-who during the
1930s and 1940s came to rank among California's 'foremost earthquake engineers'.
(On Huber and Dewell, see Winfield Scott Downs (ed.). Who's Who in Engineering
(5th ed.. New York, 1941), 452 and 871, and Proceedings of the Fourth World Conference
on Earthquake Engineering (Santiago, Chile, 1969), 4: 49.)
In January 1907, architect Charles Hays and civil engineer A. H. Markwart joined
Howard and Galloway's firm. At the end of 1908, when the partnership dissolved.
Galloway started a partnership with Markwart, who, like he, was primarily
interested in hydroelectric power. Later, Galloway chaired the ASCE Special
Committee on Effects of Earthquakes on Engineering Structures formed following
the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and at age seventy-one published, with colleague
Leander M. Hoskins, 'Earthquakes and Structures', Transactions of the American
Society of Civil Engineers, 1940,105: 269-322.
20. Hall, op. cit. (11), 23. On engineering and social repsonsibility, see Edwin T. Layton,
The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession
(Cleveland, 1971).
21. Hansen and Condon, op. cit. (1), 108.
22. Ibid., 108-110.
23. Gilbert is quoted in Wood, op. cit. (6), 199; J. C. Branner, 'Earthquakes and Structural
James C. Williams 193