The Tongues of Seismology in the Nineteenth Century

The study of earthquakes in the nineteenth century was peculiarly vulnerable to language barriers. In the age before reliable seismographs, eyewitness testimony was essential to investigating earthquakes. Beginning in the 1870s, scientists in the multilingual states of Switzerland and imperial Austria pioneered networks of lay, volunteer observers to report on felt ground motion. These networks played an important role in establishing the evidence for a tectonic interpretation of earthquakes; they also helped communities asess seismic risk. Yet perhaps the most unique product of this expert-lay collaboration was the language of observational seismology itself: a vernacular scientific language. The concept of a vernacular scientific language may seem paradoxical, but the paradox exists only from the perspective of the technocratic age that followed. The language of observational seismology was in fact multiple, developing simultaneously in the various tongues spoken across central Europe. This paper analyzes observational seismology’s strategies of “translation”: between speakers of different vernaculars, between experts and laypeople, and between humans and instruments. Might political multilingualism have furnished a model for scientific communication? What lessons might this case hold for the tension between scientific globalization and expert-lay communication today?