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1 17 Tithe Court, Glebelands Road, Wokingham, Berkshire, RG40 1DS, UK
2 Department of Geology, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK
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‘In so far as British engineering geologists think about such things, there is probably a belief that engineering geology in the UK ‘started’ shortly after the Second World War...’
The purpose of this Discussion is to show that many examples of the practice of engineering geology in Great Britain can be found dating from before the Second World War, and, indeed, some from much earlier if we include rudimentary soil and rock mechanics, and the assessment of stone and rock for road making and building, as falling within the ambit of engineering geology. The examples that follow come from my own personal interests, but I am sure that readers will know of others.
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Another example comes from 1866 during the construction tunnels in London Clay for the Metropolitan Railway in London. During the works, the resident engineer took progressive measurements of the settlement above the tunnel, and plotted cross sections showing the shape of the settlement trough. As a result of this careful work, the contractor assumed responsibility for the resulting damage to property on the surface on either side of the tunnel line (West 1988). Again, minimizing and predicting settlement above tunnels in London Clay (as well as other strata) continued to be a matter of concern to tunnel engineers right down to recent times (Bell et al. 1988).
My third example comes from 1815–1830 when Thomas Telford constructed the Holyhead Road (Rolt 1986). The most difficult sections of the road were in Wales and Telford decided that for mail coaches to run easily there must be no gradient steeper than 1 in 20, even in mountainous country. This involved blasting cuttings through rock, forming embankments and building high retaining walls, and providing for adequate drainage. Here we can see the practice of rock mechanics: this skill was no doubt partly based on Telford's early career as a stonemason.
In 1930 the Ministry of Transport opened an experimental station at Harmondsworth, Middlesex which in 1933 became the Road Research Laboratory (RRL). In 1937 a Soils Section was established at RRL to carry out research on those aspects of soil mechanics relating to the earthworks and foundations of roads (Charlesworth 1987). During the Second World War the Laboratory organised courses in road and airfield construction for personnel from the fighting services. After the war, the lecture notes for the soils courses were amplified, edited and published as Soil Mechanics for Road Engineers (Road Research Laboratory 1952) which soon earned an international reputation as the authoritative textbook on the subject.
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Although the testing of roadstone is not as old as that of building stone, it too goes back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, in 1903attrition tests on roadstones were being carried out at the Museum of Practical Geology (Lovegrove et al. 1906), but in 1911 responsibility for roadstone testing was transferred to the National Physical Laboratory although the results continued to be published by the Geological Survey of Great Britain in their various regional memoirs (e.g. Anderson 1939). The tests were: attrition, abrasion, impact, cementation, crushing, water absorption, and specific gravity. After the Second World War, research into the testing of roadstone became one of the responsibilities of the Soils Section at RRL, and one of the first priorities was the development of aggregate tests instead of tests on individual specimens. Particularly important was the devising of a test to measure the resistance to polishing by rubber tyres of the stone to be used in the road surface (Maclean 1968) which has made a major contribution to road safety over the following years. The petrographical examination of roadstone also goes back a long way, at least to 1912 when it was practised by Edwin Massey Bull, a civil engineer who specialised in roads; as might be expected it was also a subject of early study by the Geological Survey (Lovegrove 1929). A textbook on testing road aggregates including petrography was published by Knight & Knight (1935), and subsequent developments have been described elsewhere (West 1995).
Before leaving this subject, the earliest mention of the phrase engineering geology that I have come across is its use in the title of a paper by Lapworth (1908).
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Nevertheless, I agree with Professor Culshaw that the profession of engineering geology in the UK can be dated to 1964 with the formation of the Engineering Group of the Geological Society, followed in 1967 when the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology commenced publication, and I have personal recollections of both these events. To these I would add the importance of the Annual Regional Meetings of the Engineering Group as being of crucial importance to fostering the profession: they provided the opportunity for the most junior member to meet the most senior – especially during the informality of the associated field excursions.
E. P. F. Rose writes: Professor Culshaw's illuminating paper debates whether Woodward's (1897) memoir with its included map might be regarded as ‘The first engineering geological publication in the UK?’ – and Professor Fookes in discussion (Volume 38, pp. 105–108) perceptively refines definition of ‘engineering geology’, demonstrating that a close relationship existed between geology and engineering in the UK by the mid nineteenth century. Responding to the hope for further research expressed at the end of Martin Culshaw's reply to discussion by Peter Fookes and also Mike de Freitas, I add a few details to help document that relationship even further.
From early in the nineteenth century UK, there are examples of what might be termed ‘geology by engineers’. Professors Culshaw and Fookes have both noted the significance of William Smith. Smith, long credited as the ‘father of modern English Geology’, styled himself as an ‘engineer and mineralogist’ on the title page of his first book (Smith 1806: a work dealing with land drainage rather than geology), but was already also perceived as a geologist of distinction by 1805 when Sir John Sinclair of the Board of Agriculture unsuccessfully proposed that he be attached ‘as a geologist’ to the Ordnance (i.e. military) engineers then topographically mapping the country (Torrens 2003, p. xxvii). Smith was styled ‘mineral surveyor’ on his 1815 map, ‘engineer and mineral surveyor’ in the memoir (Smith 1815) that accompanied it, and ‘civil engineer and mineral surveyor’ in his Stratigraphical System of Organised Fossils of 1817 (Torrens 2003, p. 188).
At this time ‘civil’ engineering was still emerging as a discipline from military origins. As briefly reviewed by Weiler (1987), partly after Porter (1889), the term ‘engineer’ had been used from the Middle Ages to denote someone engaged in the design of military engines and defence works, and in the UK a (military) Corps of Engineers was formed in 1716. Its officers were trained at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich from 1741, the Corps was separated more distinctly from the Royal Artillery in 1759, and re-titled the Corps of Royal Engineers in 1787. From 1798 the East India Company also placed a number of engineer cadets at the Royal Military Academy, until the Company's own military college was founded at Addiscombe in Surrey in 1809. A Society of Civil Engineers existed from 1771, but even at the time the Institution of Civil Engineers was established in 1818 there were more ‘military’ than ‘civil’ UK engineers – a ratio which reversed rapidly and very significantly thereafter. By the middle of the century there were about a thousand professional engineers in civilian practice, probably double the combined strength in the Royal and Indian engineer corps. But earlier, when the first government geological survey department in the UK was founded, in Ireland in 1826–28 (Herries Davies 1974, 1983, 1995; Wyse Jackson 1997; Rose 1999), it was staffed by Royal Engineer officers: Captain J W Pringle, and lieutenants J E Portlock, G F Bordes, R S Fenwick, and W Lancey. The geological map of the north County Londonderry parish of Aghanloo, drawn at a scale of six inches to one mile (1:10 360) and dating from around 1828 (Herries Davies 1983; Rose 1999, fig. 2) is the earliest known geological map by Royal Engineers on duty – although a 1-inch to 1-mile geological map of the Channel Island of Jersey was prepared at a similar date by Lieutenant R J Nelson of the Royal Engineers in his off-duty time (Rose 2005a).
‘Geology for engineers’ arguably also had an origin early in the nineteenth century. From 1819, Dr John MacCulloch lectured on geology to cadets at Addiscombe (Cumming 1980; Rose 1996, 1997). Originally established to provide training for potential engineer and artillery officers, the college soon also provided training for the infantry. At this time Addiscombe was the only place in England other than the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to provide a course in systematic geology. Moreover, in 1820 the Court of the Company agreed pre-publication to buy 400 copies of MacCulloch's (1821) book: A geological classification of rocks – the first textbook written specifically to complement an annual British geological lecture course; the first comprehensive, systematic, descriptive, catalogue of rocks to be prepared by a British author (Cumming 1980, 1983); and so arguably the first British textbook written specifically to provide ‘geology for engineers’. ‘McCulloch [sic] on Rocks’ was one of the ten textbooks which soon had to be bought by all cadets, to 1835 at least (Vibart 1894, p. 121). Addiscombe produced about 500 engineer officers from its foundation in 1809 to closure in 1861, most of whom were taught some geology: by MacCulloch from 1819 until his death in 1835, or by D T Ansted from 1845 until the East India Company lost its sovereign powers following the war generated by the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857.
The 1840s witnessed a rapidly widening perception of a relationship between geology and engineering. Additional to the substantial evidence for this provided by Professor Fookes, it might be noted that in 1845 David Thomas Ansted began to lecture on geology not only at Addiscombe, but near-concurrently at the College of Civil Engineers, Putney – and that seemingly he made use of his then recent textbooks (Ansted 1844, 1845) for teaching purposes. Ansted was already professor of geology at King's College London. Later described as an ‘eminent’ geologist (Reeve 1864), he became known more for his proficiency as a ‘consulting geologist’ than for ‘original research’ (Sanders 1887). In 1845, the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland (founded in 1835, under military, Board of Ordnance, auspices) was transferred to civilian status – albeit with a Local Director for Ireland (Captain Henry James) who was still a Royal Engineer officer (Herries Davies 1983, 1995; Rose 1996). Geology formed a substantial 100-page 14-plate section (Portlock 1850) in the massive three-volume Aide-Mémoire to the Military Sciences (Lewis et al. 1846–1852) compiled for the ‘scientific corps’ (i.e. the engineers and artillery) of the British and East India Company's armies. The section's author, trained in geology in Ireland by Captain Pringle, was a Royal Engineer officer who later became president of the Geological Society of London. Moreover, it was an engineer graduate of Addiscombe, Richard Baird Smith, who published a substantial early Essay on Geology, as a branch of study especially meriting the attention of the Corps of Engineers (Smith 1849). Smith enthusiastically advocated a place for geology in military education on the grounds that the subject was ‘fascinating’ (Smith 1849, p. 28) and potentially able to excite an interest in the applied sciences as such; also, that it could be put to practical military use, notably in siting boreholes for water supply, in road alignment and construction, and in bridge building.
However, ‘engineering geology’ as strictly defined by Professor Fookes did not emerge in the British army until the Great War of 1914–18. Various water-supply and indeed hydrogeological maps were generated from 1915 for areas of the Western Front in Belgium and northern France (Anon 1922; Rose 2004a). Later in the war, the Welsh-born Oxford-educated Australian geology professor and temporary lieutenant-colonel T W Edgeworth David prepared maps, based on geological and hydrogeological information, that illustrated the relative suitability or otherwise of the ground for dugout construction, e.g. a map of Wytschaete, Belgium, at scale of 1:10 000, printed by the Ordnance Survey in May 1918 (Anon 1922, plate IV; Rose 2004b, fig. 9). Two primary colours were used: red and blue, with intermediate shades. The redder the formation as indicated on the map, the drier it was for dugout purposes; the bluer, the wetter. Branagan (1987, p. 43) has referred to these as ‘probably the first environmental/engineering geology maps ever published’, but seemingly in ignorance of the Woodward (1897) map described by Professor Culshaw – as well as of the many achievements of German military geologists earlier in the war (Rose et al. 2000). Nevertheless, the ‘belief that engineering geology in the UK ‘started’ after the Second World War’ of 1939–45, which is challenged by Professor Culshaw's paper, certainly seems to be untenable without appropriate qualification.
Early in their history, engineering and geology were even more closely associated in Germany and France than in the UK. It is well known that from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries many students of geology were influenced by the teaching of A G Werner at the mining academy of Freiberg in Saxony (Schiffner 1935). Moreover, the French national use of geology pioneered at the end of the eighteenth century was an initiative also derived largely from mining engineering (Eyles 1950). When a French army commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in July 1798, it was accompanied by a Commission of Sciences and Arts: about 150 experts predominantly (but by no means exclusively) with engineering-related skills – including the ‘professor’ of geology (Déodat de Dolomieu) from the School of Mines in Paris, and several of the School's recent graduates (Rose 2004c, 2005b) specifically as ‘mineralogists’ (i.e. geologists). In France a relationship between geology and engineering is detectable for more than a century: of the 73 presidents of the Geological Society of France who held office for one or more years during its first hundred years, from 1830 to 1929, 25 were engineers, 25 professors, and 23 amateurs (Margerie 1930). But that is another story.
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