Terzaghi Library - lecture Istanbul 1995
Presented at "70 years of soil mechanics"
April 11-13, 1995 Istanbul, Turkey, Opening Session
by Suzanne Lacasse, Managing Director, Norwegian Geotechnical Institute
NGI has the privilege of being the custodian of the Terzaghi Library. The library is unique, both from the a soil mechanics side and the bibliographical side, as it represents one of the largest collections of original manuscripts that documents the birth of a scientific speciality. The Terzaghi Library is well acclaimed in library circles and was the subject of an article in the Norwegian journal Bok og bibliotek (Book and Library) in 1995.
The reason why NGI has been given this honour is the result of happy coincidences for NGI and the genius of NGI's first director Laurits Bjerrum. When Bjerrum visited Professor Fröhlich in Vienna in 1957 he spotted all of Karl Terzaghi's papers collecting dust in an archive. Bjerrum wrote to Terzaghi to ask permission to catalogue the documents. He would then send the documents to Karl Terzaghi in Boston. When Terzaghi found out the historical and technical value of the documents, he asked NGI in 1958 to keep them for him. Later, in his will, Karl Terzaghi bequeathed all of his papers to NGI.
In 1967, the Terzaghi Library was officially opened. As recently as 1988, we received from Ruth Terzaghi a series of boxes with 6 m³ of documents.
In January 1960, Laurits Bjerrum wrote a letter to Karl Terzaghi saying:
"There is another reason for wishing that both of you will come to Oslo this year. The "Terzaghi Library" is now a matter of fact and here in my office I face a wall which contains 12 metres run of the material which we received from Vienna and which is now meticulously arranged, bound, put in boxes and arranged in the book shelves. I have already made use of a good deal of the information and we are indeed proud of having this material here and I would like to show it to you. I guess you have already forgotten how productive you must have been in the early days and how many pages you have written during the period up to 1936. I am especially proud of your "Notes on Construction (1912-13)" which covers almost the entire field of civil engineering and which leads to the invention of soil mechanics in a very clear and impressive way."
The Terzaghi Library collection at NGI includes:
- Vienna material (until 1940s)
- Harvard material (until 1963)
- Ruth Terzaghi's estate
- Consulting reports, publications, manuscripts, notes
- Diaries and agendas, autobiographical material
- Correspondence, organised by countries
The collection gives insight into Terzaghi's personality, his work habits and methods, his accomplishments, his relations with people and organisations and the activities he enjoyed. There is no doubt that Terzaghi was a brilliant, fearless and enthusiastic man.
As summarised in a recent lecture by Professor Dick Goodman, Terzaghi¿s work habits were exemplary: Karl Terzaghi was objective, rational, a clear independent thinker, capable of long days and continuous hard work. He was diligent and followed through with his responsibilities to completion. He had high standards of intellectual honesty, he was an outstanding observer, but was suspicious of intuitive approaches. Terzaghi's motto might have been "Persevere or Perish", as he quoted in a letter to Wittenbauer in January 1918.
Terzaghi relished friendship and gave much of himself to those he enjoyed being with or learning from. He could be demanding of friends, he enjoyed walking in the mountains. He loved geology, reading and travelling.
NGI offers a Terzaghi fellowship to persons who would like to study an aspect of Terzaghi's work for a few months and write a report about it. There have been 14 so far (from eight different countries). Cetin Soydemir, from Turkey, prepared in 1970 a report on Terzaghi's period in Turkey. The different fellows to date are listed in Annex 1.
There are presently four persons who are working with either biographies or specific aspects of Karl Terzaghi's life: Prof. R. Goodman (USA), Prof. R. De Boer (Germany), Prof. R. Schiffman (USA) and Prof. K. Özodogru (Turkey).
Karl Terzaghi was a great man, as referenced in Arthur Casagrande¿s nomination of Karl Terzaghi for the Medal of Science:
"In addition to those figures in the engineering world whose names are connected with some remarkable structure, there is a small group of great engineers, often scarcely known to the layman, who have profoundly influenced the mode of thought of their contemporaries, and consequently have initiated new eras in civil engineering practice. Professor Terzaghi is one such man, and his stature is comparable to that of Navier in the early 19th century and Euler in the 18th century."
NGI has a complex history of moving from one building to another, and the Terzaghi Library has followed. At last it has arrived, we hope, at it's fourth and last location. In NGI's building in Oslo, the board of directors' room has become the Terzaghi Library. We are very proud of how the library now looks, and we feel that the location is a setting worthy of Terzaghi's work.
The library also contains some of the gold medals awarded to Terzaghi, his several doctoral degrees, oedometers used by Terzaghi and Arthur Casagrande and donated to NGI by Terzaghi's student Philip Keene and University of Texas at Austin, and a number of artistic sketches by Terzaghi himself, private letters and private photographs.
The documents in the Terzaghi Library contain many quotations by Terzaghi, two of which we selected for this symposium:
"Out theories will be superseded by better ones,
but the results of conscientious observations in the field will remain
as a permanent asset of inestimable value to the profession."
"The worst habit you can possibly acquire
is to become uncritical towards your own concepts
and at the same time sceptical towards those of others.
Once you arrive at that state you are in the grip of senility, regardless of your age."