"THE COMING OF AGE OF SOIL MECHANICS: 1920-1970" The First Spencer J. Buchanan Lecture by DR. RALPH B. PECK Friday, October 22, 1993 Lecture Room A Clayton W. Williams, Jr. Alumni Center George Bush Drive and Houston Street Texas A&M University College Station, TexasThe Coming of Age of Soil Mechanics 1920-1970 The First Spencer J. Buchanan Lecture Texas A&M University October 22, 1993 by Ralph B. Peck INTRODUCTION Spencer Buchanan and I had in common our profession of soil mechanics, at a time when the discipline was just beginning to take its place in the engineering world. We were both fortunate to have known Karl Terzaghi. Along with many other disciples, we both practiced our profession under his powerful influence. Most new disciplines, whether in science, engineering, or any other field of endeavor, pass through stages of development much like the stages of growth of an individual human being. Like a human being, the discipline has an ancestry or heritage, followed by a period of gestation and birth. Often there is a period of rapid youthful growth, a young adulthood in which there is a struggle for acceptance, and finally a mature stage when the full potential of the discipline is realized. In most branches of knowledge and disciplines these stages represent the work and ideas of many individuals often widely separated in space and time. Soil mechanics is an exception. Rarely has the development of one branch of human endeavor been so largely the result of the efforts of a single individual. Karl Terzaghi, in the last half of his lifetime, created the subject as we know it today and brought it into the mainstream of civil engineering practice. How he did this is a fascinating story in which both Spencer and I played a small part, and which I should like to sketch for you.Within the last few months, two well-qualified people, one in this country and one in Europe, have indicated their intention to write a biography of Karl Terzaghi. Each of them has concluded that the effort will take at least six years. Certainly, in a brief hour, I can do no more than hope to give you the flavor of this man to whom Spencer Buchanan and I, along with a host of other engineers, owe so much. ANCESTRY Foundations, excavations, tunnels, and dams were being built long before Terzaghi. Many were successful, some were disastrous failures. Engineers had little to guide them but experience, which often served them well but occasionally failed them. Up to about 1920 there was little in the body of knowledge possessed by the practitioners except a few classical theories of earth pressure, a few pile-driving formulas, often misleading, and a somewhat misguided reliance on load tests in the field. This is the state of the subject when the young Terzaghi graduated from the Technische Hochschule of Graz in Austria in mechanical engineering, a subject that seemed not to appeal to him, for he attended classes as seldom as possible and was nearly expelled for his non-scholastic activities. ‘The bright spot in his education was geology, in which he took a great interest, to the extent that he later used his spare time in 1904 and 1905 while in the Austrian Army to translate into German the “Outline of Field Geology" by A. Geikie. After his army service, he entered the field of civil engineering as an engineer for a contractor who, because of Terzaghi's knowledge of geology, assigned him to jobs involving problems with rock and soil. During the next few years, ‘Terzaghi was faced by the failure of a gravity dam resting on a soil layer of apparently excellent quality, by unexpected foundation difficulties in the construction of a hydroelectric power plant, and by the unanticipated occurrence of excessive settlements of a building in Vienna. These and other similar incidents, even where the geology was well understood, challenged Terzaghi to raise the state of knowledge in earthwork engineering to a higher level. In his words, there "grew within me a decision to devote my working power to the exploration of the borderland between geology and foundation engineering". (Transl. by L. Bjerrum).