This book has several purposes. First, I wrote it for my own reeducation. After spending 14 years as an assistant and associate dean, I knew I had failed to keep up with new ideas in seismology. On retirement, I set out to remedy this. Writing a history of seismology appeared to be a logical and useful way to give direction and organization to my reading. The science is progressing so rapidly that I may never catch up.

My main goal in writing this history is to provide a basis from which a seismologist can start to research a new topic. In reporting research, it is often helpful to begin with references to the classic, basic papers on the subject. I have tried to reference a wide spectrum of such papers here. When a source is not stated, it will often be found in Charles Davison's (1927) The Founders of Seismology or in Beno Gutenberg's (1941) article in the Geological Society of America's Geology, 1880–1938. As one of Gutenberg's former students, I find that his careful style of referencing has greatly influenced me (see, e.g., Gutenberg, 1951, 1959).

Another goal in writing this book has been to show how new ideas came into being, that is, how the understanding of earthquakes has grown from the earliest simplest ideas to modern concepts. It has become obvious in doing this that ideas grow from simple early inspiration to later full-blown understanding as a result of extensive observational and experimental researches.