John Milne

British engineer, geologist, and seismologist

• Born: December 30, 1850
• Birthplace: Liverpool, England
• Died: July 31, 1913
• Place of death: Shide, Isle of Wight, England

Milne, regarded as the “father of modern seismology,” invented the first modern seismograph. He also established the world’s first international seismological monitoring network.

Primary field: Geology

Primary invention: Seismograph

Early Life

John Milne was born in 1850 in Liverpool, England, to John Milne and Emma Twycross. He grew up in the Greater Manchester towns of Rochdale and Tunshill, Milnrow. He received his early education in Rochdale and at Liverpool Collegiate Institute. Awarded a monetary prize for academic excellence when he was thirteen, he spent the money on a holiday tour of England’s Lake District; from there, he decided to cross over to Ireland and continued to Dublin, subsisting largely on apples plucked along the way and whatever he could earn playing the piano at roadside pubs. An adventurer by nature, the adolescent Milne later took to exploring England’s waterways by canoe.

At seventeen, he entered King’s College, London, where he focused on geology and mechanics. After an expedition to Iceland, he continued his studies at England’s Royal School of Mines, earning the credentials to become a mining engineer. He did fieldwork in practical mining engineering in Cornwall and Lancashire, studied mineralogy at the Bergakademie in Freiberg, Germany, and from there visited central Europe’s principal mining districts.

After returning home, the twenty-two-year-old Milne was hired for a job overseas, where he spent two years assessing and reporting on the mineral resources of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 1874, he went back to England only to embark on yet another voyage, this time as part of British geographer Charles Tilstone Beke’s expedition to Egypt to determine the location of the biblical Mount Sinai.

In 1875, Milne accepted a position in Japan as professor of mining and geology at Tokyo’s recently established Imperial College of Engineering. Not fond of sea voyages, Milne made most of the trip over land. The months-long trek across Europe and Asia included one thirty-one-day stretch with no roads, no houses, no change of clothes, and little food. Upon reaching Japan in 1876, the seasoned adventurer had a new experience: On the night of his arrival in Tokyo, he felt his first earthquake.

Life’s Work

Milne’s appointment to the Imperial College was part of a Japanese program to hire foreign nationals to help the country gain parity with the industrialized West. During his first years there, Milne divided his time between his teaching duties and the various geological attractions his new home offered. He traversed the countryside and made scientific observations, excavated prehistoric shell mounds, and climbed and sketched volcanoes. He also experimented with instruments for monitoring earth motion during seismic activity.

On February 22, 1880, a moderately severe earthquake struck the Tokyo-Yokohama area. Milne was eager to study the quake and its effects, but locating its epicenter and assessing its relative strength and direction of movement proved to be a challenge. Had the quake struck an urban area in Europe, he would have determined its intensity through field observations of damage to structures. However, the commonly used intensity scales (developed in Italy) did not translate easily to Japan because Japanese architecture and construction techniques were so unlike the West’s. Where Mediterranean stone and masonry would collapse in a major quake, a wooden structure in Tokyo would sway and jerk violently only to return to its original state once the shaking stopped. To gather data, Milne had to turn to European expatriate communities in Tokyo where Western-style construction predominated. He also sent out questionnaires, surveyed fallen gravestones, and learned what he could from a scattered hodgepodge of seismic monitoring devices created by some of the Western scientists then living in Tokyo.

Milne and two fellow Englishmen also teaching at the Imperial College—Professor of Telegraphy Thomas Gray and Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Physics James Alfred Ewing—collaborated to found an organization that would pool the expertise of Japanese and foreign researchers to collect and systematize information about earthquakes in Japan. That organization, the Seismological Society of Japan, held its inaugural meeting two months after the Tokyo-Yokohama earthquake. With the support of the minister of public works, the society deployed a pendulum-type seismometer codesigned by Ewing, Gray, and Milne in several telegraph offices across the Musashi Plain, the area west of modern-day Tokyo. (The telegraph offices offered the combined conveniences of rapid communications and clocks that were synchronized daily.)

From 1880 on, Milne focused his attentions on earthquakes. He conducted research, wrote extensively (two-thirds of the articles the Seismological Society published were his), and designed monitoring instruments. He investigated small vibratory ground motions using microphones and studied his instruments’ response to simulated earthquakes he created by dropping heavy iron weights and setting off gunpowder explosions. His classic Earthquakes and Other Earth Movements was published in 1886 and was reprinted numerous times over the next half century. In 1887, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, England’s prestigious national academy of sciences.

Milne was in Japan during the great Nōbi earthquake of 1891, one of the largest seismic events in the country’s history, and he conducted an extended field survey of the damage. When, in 1892, Japan’s new Imperial Earthquake Investigation Committee superseded the Seismological Society, Milne began to devote more time to studying and recording teleseisms (distant earthquakes). In 1893, he created the Milne seismograph, a highly sensitive horizontal-pendulum instrument capable of detecting earthquakes occurring at a great distance.

In 1895, Milne’s connection with the Japanese government came to an end. He returned to England—along with his wife, Tone Noritsune, and his assistant, Shinobu Hirota—though not before a house fire destroyed many of his possessions, including instruments he had hoped to deploy in his home country. The Milnes settled on the Isle of Wight, in a location the seismologist chose based on the likelihood that small tremors could be felt there. At his new home, dubbed Shide Hill House, Milne set up a seismological laboratory and a seismograph station for detecting teleseisms and small local seismic events.

In 1897, Milne obtained funding from the Royal Society to establish an international network of earthquake monitoring stations equipped with Milne seismographs. Stations were established in roughly fifty locations, including sites in England and the British Empire, the United States, Canada, Russia, and Antarctica. The stations reported to Milne regularly, and he issued periodic catalogs of the world earthquakes the network detected. Milne used network data to create the first worldwide map of earthquake zones. He also published a second comprehensive text on earthquake science, Seismology (1898).

Shide Hill House became an international center for earthquake research. One visitor to Shide, a vacationing amateur scientist named John Johnson Shaw, wound up entering into a long-term collaboration with Milne to improve his eponymous seismograph.

In 1913, the year the Milne-Shaw seismograph was completed, Milne died suddenly from Bright’s disease at the age of sixty-two. The seismological network headquartered at Shide continued for another six years before being transferred to Oxford University.

Impact

Milne played a major role in making seismology into a modern, quantitative science. He gave the world its first seismic network and pioneered the development and use of standardized instruments that, in comparison with their predecessors, were remarkably sensitive, reliable, and precise. He also generated a staggering body of observational data.

While later innovations such as electromagnetic seismographs, electronic amplification of signals, and digital recording methods have sidelined mechanical seismographs like Milne’s, most of today’s seismometers employ the same basic principles that Milne’s did: When the ground shakes, the inertia of a weighted pendulum causes the instrument’s frame to be displaced in relation to the pendulum; the resulting motion is amplified; and that amplified motion is recorded as a function of time.

The international seismic network Milne created in the early twentieth century was the forerunner of today’s array of seismological networks that monitor seismic activity around the globe. Worldwide earthquake observation efforts have enabled seismologists to study global patterns in seismic activity and to form a better picture of how earthquake forces move through the earth. Today’s digital networks can provide researchers with real-time data; in addition, they can help emergency response teams determine where to focus their efforts when a large earthquake strikes a populated area and communication systems are down or overloaded. In some regions, these networks can also generate early-warning information for the public, giving people valuable seconds to act before the most severe shaking begins.

Bibliography

Clancey, Gregory K. Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1868-1930. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. A unique history focusing on modern Japanese earthquakes and earthquake science. Chapter 3, “The Seismologists,” is devoted to Milne and his Seismological Society colleagues in Tokyo. Later chapters look at his research efforts and conclusions made in the wake of the great Nōbi earthquake of 1891. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

Dewey, James, and Perry Byerly. “The Early History of Seismometry (to 1900).” Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 59, no. 1 (February, 1969): 183-227. An excellent overview of the early efforts to monitor and measure earthquakes. Milne’s work is introduced in the section detailing the development of the seismograph in Japan. See especially the diagram and discussion of the Milne seismograph in the section on the seismograph as an international instrument. Figures, references.

Herbert-Gustar, A. L., and P. A. Nott. John Milne, Father of Modern Seismology. Tenterden, Kent, England: Norbury, 1980. One of the few book-length resources on the seismologist. Details Milne’s life from his adventurous boyhood through his later years at Shide Hill House. Illustrations, maps, bibliography.

Milne, John, and Alwyn Walter Lee. Earthquakes and Other Earth Movements. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son & Co., 1939. A later edition of Milne’s often-reprinted 1886 classic. Chapter 2, “Seismometry,” describes some of the instruments designed by Milne and other Seismological Society members. Figures, references, index.

National Research Council. Living on an Active Earth: Perspectives on Earthquake Science. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2003. Chapter 2, “Rise of Earthquake Science,” describes Milne’s role in the development of seismometry and the quantification of earthquakes as it traces seismology’s evolution from early times through the digital age. Notes, index.