文档介绍：DAWN OF EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING
Shunsuke OTANI
ABSTRACT
This paper briefly reviews the development of earthquake engineering before the measurement of ground acceleration started in the early 1930s and the response calculation was made possible in the early 1940s. The first effort was to estimate the maximum ground acceleration to formulate the design seismic forces, which the engineers and researchers tried to formulate without the knowledge of the measurement of ground acceleration signals. A mechanical analyzer was used to calculate the response of simple systems to ground motion.
DEVELOPMENT OF SEISMOLOGY AND GEOPHSICS
It is necessary to briefly review the development of seismology before discussing the earthquake engineering. Earthquake phenomena must have attracted the curiosity of scientists in the past. Ancient Greek sophists hypothesized different causes of earthquakes. Aristotle (383-322 .), for example, related atmospheric events such as wind, thunder and lightning, and subterranean events, and explained that the dry and smoky vapors caused the earthquakes under the earth, and wind, thunder, lightning in the atmosphere. Aristotle’s theory was believed through middle ages in Europe. The 1755 Lisbon, Portugal, Earthquake (), which killed 70,000 partially due to Tsunami tidal wave, and a series of earthquakes in London in 1749 and 1750 attracted the interest of European scientists who dealt with the phenomena in a scientific manner.
The first scientific investigation about earthquake phenomena is believed to be carried out by Robert Mallet (1810-1881) who considered the earthquake phenomena as the propagation of vibration waves; he measured the velocity of waves in the earth using explosions of gunpowder. He investigated the earthquake phenomena of the 1857 Naples Earthquake (Mallet, 1862). Such technical terms as “seismology,”“hypocenter,”“isoseismal,” and “wave path” were introduced by him.
Department of Design and Architecture, Faculty of Eng