Beginnings of Regular Seismic Service and Research in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: Part II

Abstract

We closed the preceding part of our paper with the statements that a regular macroseismic service of unprecedented effectivity had been successfully established in the Austrian part of the Monarchy in 1896-1899, and that first continuous instrumental observations had been started at the seismic stations in Ljubljana, Trieste and Kremsmünster in 1897, 1898 and 1899, respectively. In the present part we report how the macroseismic service performed its task from the beginning of the 20^th century until the outbreak of World War I, we briefly summarize the beginnings and development of observational seismology in the Hungarian part of the Monarchy, and we inform the reader about the state of European seismometry at the time of establishment of the first stations of the Austro-Hungarian seismographic network.

Main topics of the present paper are the history of the development, the principles and properties of the instruments, and the milestones in the interpretation of instrumental observations in both parts of the Monarchy in 1897-1914. The wealth of information extracted from over seventy original papers and books of geoscientists of the time is summarized in the form of two, to a large extent self explaining tables. In Table 1 the altogether seventeen seismic stations gradually established in the Austrian as well as Hungarian parts of the Monarchy in 1897-1914 are ordered chronologically according to the date of initiation of regular measurements at them, and the instruments by which the stations were originally equipped and later successively upgraded are specified. The most important facts about progress in the instrumentation and in the analysis, interpretation and archivation of the observational material are summed up in the last column of Table 1. The principles of the altogether sixteen different types of seismic instruments that were in operation at the stations of the Austro-Hungarian network in the discussed period are explained and their basic technical parameters are specified in Table 2. Those instrumental problems, those moments in the methodology of interpretation of the instrumental observations, and the contributions of those scientists who most decisively influenced the progress of Austro-Hungarian seismology in 1897-1914 are commented in more detail in the text.

At the end of the first decade of the 20^th century, the instrumentation of the stations of the Austro-Hungarian seismographic network as well as the scientific erudition and publication activities of the station directors and involved geosavants, especially of A. Belar, H. Benndorf, R. Kövesligethy, V. Láska, E. Mazelle, A. and S. Mohorovičić and A. Réthly, had reached a standard comparable with that of analogous activities in Italy and Germany. The well developed Austrian macroseismic service gradually disintegrated during World War I. After the war, seismology progressed in the newly constituted states Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia in broader, all-European collaboration.