"THE COMING OF AGE OF SOIL MECHANICS: 1920-1970" The First Spencer J. Buchanan Lecture by DR. RALPH B. PECK Friday, October 22, 1993 Lecture Room A Clayton W. Williams, Jr. Alumni Center George Bush Drive and Houston Street Texas A&M University College Station, TexasThe Coming of Age of Soil Mechanics 1920-1970 The First Spencer J. Buchanan Lecture Texas A&M University October 22, 1993 by Ralph B. Peck INTRODUCTION Spencer Buchanan and I had in common our profession of soil mechanics, at a time when the discipline was just beginning to take its place in the engineering world. We were both fortunate to have known Karl Terzaghi. Along with many other disciples, we both practiced our profession under his powerful influence. Most new disciplines, whether in science, engineering, or any other field of endeavor, pass through stages of development much like the stages of growth of an individual human being. Like a human being, the discipline has an ancestry or heritage, followed by a period of gestation and birth. Often there is a period of rapid youthful growth, a young adulthood in which there is a struggle for acceptance, and finally a mature stage when the full potential of the discipline is realized. In most branches of knowledge and disciplines these stages represent the work and ideas of many individuals often widely separated in space and time. Soil mechanics is an exception. Rarely has the development of one branch of human endeavor been so largely the result of the efforts of a single individual. Karl Terzaghi, in the last half of his lifetime, created the subject as we know it today and brought it into the mainstream of civil engineering practice. How he did this is a fascinating story in which both Spencer and I played a small part, and which I should like to sketch for you.Within the last few months, two well-qualified people, one in this country and one in Europe, have indicated their intention to write a biography of Karl Terzaghi. Each of them has concluded that the effort will take at least six years. Certainly, in a brief hour, I can do no more than hope to give you the flavor of this man to whom Spencer Buchanan and I, along with a host of other engineers, owe so much. ANCESTRY Foundations, excavations, tunnels, and dams were being built long before Terzaghi. Many were successful, some were disastrous failures. Engineers had little to guide them but experience, which often served them well but occasionally failed them. Up to about 1920 there was little in the body of knowledge possessed by the practitioners except a few classical theories of earth pressure, a few pile-driving formulas, often misleading, and a somewhat misguided reliance on load tests in the field. This is the state of the subject when the young Terzaghi graduated from the Technische Hochschule of Graz in Austria in mechanical engineering, a subject that seemed not to appeal to him, for he attended classes as seldom as possible and was nearly expelled for his non-scholastic activities. ‘The bright spot in his education was geology, in which he took a great interest, to the extent that he later used his spare time in 1904 and 1905 while in the Austrian Army to translate into German the “Outline of Field Geology" by A. Geikie. After his army service, he entered the field of civil engineering as an engineer for a contractor who, because of Terzaghi's knowledge of geology, assigned him to jobs involving problems with rock and soil. During the next few years, ‘Terzaghi was faced by the failure of a gravity dam resting on a soil layer of apparently excellent quality, by unexpected foundation difficulties in the construction of a hydroelectric power plant, and by the unanticipated occurrence of excessive settlements of a building in Vienna. These and other similar incidents, even where the geology was well understood, challenged Terzaghi to raise the state of knowledge in earthwork engineering to a higher level. In his words, there "grew within me a decision to devote my working power to the exploration of the borderland between geology and foundation engineering". (Transl. by L. Bjerrum).GESTATION AND BIRTH To further this end Terzaghi arranged to visit numerous works under construction by the U.S. Reclamation Service, which had been founded by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. In 1912 and 1913 he visited many construction jobs in North America and gave particular attention to their geology. However, by March 1913, having found no obvious correlation between the success or failure of construction works and the geology, he was deeply discouraged. Returning to Austria at the end of 1913, he and two friends planned to start a small construction company, but World War I intervened. As a reserve officer he spent a brief period in the Balkans in a cavalry unit. He recounted how, desperately needing a new saddle, he went through all the proper formal requisition procedures and waited months for its arrival. By the time it did, however, he had been transferred to the air force at a test facility near Vienna. Much to his surprise, in 1916 he was ordered to the Imperial Institute of Engineering in Istanbul, as Turkey was allied to the Central Powers, to lecture on roads and construction. There, in spite of the war and the necessity for preparing his lecture notes in French, Terzaghi found time for further consideration of the problems of earthwork engineering. He read widely making meticulous notes and comments. He also began a long series of experiments, with very primitive equipment, including his famous cigar-box tests that established the relation between yielding of a retaining wall and the magnitude of lateral earth pressure. Other experiments related to a range of subjects including the character of surface friction of sand, bearing capacity, and the effects of upward seepage flow. It was indeed a period of gestation in which many ideas began to take form. All this hopeful progress threatened to cease abruptly, however, when the central front in Europe collapsed, and all representatives of Austria and Germany in Turkey were dismissed. With great good fortune, however, Terzaghi was engaged to teach civil engineering at Robert College, also in Istanbul, at an extremely small salary but in a congenial atmosphere. The story goes that he received his pay in dates that he would have to sell in the marketplace if he wished currency for his living needs. Nevertheless he promptly established a small laboratory, resumed his work, and reflected on and digested his experiences and studies. As he recollected later, he was sitting one day in March 1919, looking out over the glorious view of the Bosporus from the campus of Robert College, when all the experiences of the past came into focus and he suddenly realized what physical Properties had to be investigated to permit anunderstanding of the engineering behavior of soils. On a few sheets of paper he listed the needed investigations and sketched the apparatus required. Included in the apparatus was the first oedometer or consolidation device to determine the relationship among pressure, deformation, and permeability of clays. He forthwith had two of the devices made and started testing. Critical investigations into shear strength and seepage pressures followed rapidly. From that day in March, truly the birthday of soil mechanics, Yerzaghi's work came into focus and culminated in 1925 in the publication of Erdbaumechanik, which today we recognize as the first comprehensive treatise and exposition of soil mechanics. Erdbaumechanik was preceded by the publication of Terzaghi's papers on the theory of consolidation and its implied corollary, the principle of effective stress. It is noteworthy that the theory was developed after the experiments. Only when Terzaghi felt that he understood the phenomenon on the basis of intensive study of the data from tests on real foundation materials did he turn his attention to a mathematical theory embodying the results. ADOLESCENCE - THE STRUGGLE FOR ACCEPTANCE The appearance of Erdbaumechanik was not the culmination of the development of soil mechanics but only the beginning. It might have gone unnoticed but for the striking and unexpected settlement of the new and monumental structure that was to house the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Settlement of the new home of one of the leading technical institutions of the world came as a great shock to all concerned. John R. Freeman, an alumnus of the Institute and one of the outstanding engineers of his day, saw in Erdbaumechanik a possible explanation for what had happened and recommended that Terzaghi be invited to MIT. The invitation coincided with a sabbatical leave for Terzaghi, and Terzaghi accepted with alacrity. ‘Terzaghi's students at MIT from 1925 to 1928 were the true old-timers in soil mechanics. They absorbed the new teachings, carried them into practice, introduced the subject into the curricula of many universities and enthusiastically guided it into the mainstream of civil engineering. Terzaghi entered into his work at MIT with missionary zeal. Almost immediately he was invited to address the Boston Society of Civil Engineers, before whom he presented the paper "Modern Conceptions Concerning FoundationEngineering". ‘Two years later “The Science of Foundations - Its Present and Future" appeared in the Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and was discussed by an impressive number of the outstanding practitioners and educators of the day. In the meantime research at MIT proceeded on many fronts, under Terzaghi's close guidance, by such students as Glennon Gilboy, Arthur Casagrande, Leo Jurgensen, indeed a host of people whose names you would recognize. The thrust of Terzaghi's papers and much of his research at MIT was directed to observations of the behavior of full-scale structures, together with the determination of the significant physical properties of the subsurface materials. For example, in a letter of July 14, 1927, Terzaghi wrote to Mr. C. H. Eiffert, Chief Engineer of the Miami Conservancy District at Dayton, Ohio, “I received your letter of July llth and was very pleased to learn that you are willing to cooperate with us on an investigation of the core of one of your hydraulic fill dams. It seems to me that it would be advisable to sink the shaft through the core of the Germantown Dam... The data obtained from the Germantown shaft would be correlated with the data obtained from the drill hole sunk into the core of the same dam..." In a previous letter he had commented, "The gentleman who would be in direct charge of the work was known as an exceptionally brilliant student. He graduated two years ago and spent the last year as a research assistant in my soils laboratory at M.I.T. Hence there is no doubt that he would handle the proposition to the full satisfaction of everybody concerned. He wants to select the investigation as a topic for a Doctor's thesis" The man was Glennon Gilboy, and his thesis did indeed materialize, as well as a paper on hydraulic fill dams in the Journal of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers. Gilboy went on to become Terzaghi's successor at MIT when Terzaghi returned to Europe in 1928. His thesis was only one example of Terzaghi's continuing efforts to obtain, and to encourage other engineers to obtain, field ‘data regarding performance and soil properties that would suggest further lines of research or would permit assessing the ability of the new soil mechanics to predict the performance of earthworks on the basis of soil investigations and principles of soil behavior. The pattern established by Terzaghi for instruction and practice-related research was carried on at MIT by Gilboy and his associates and students, including spencer Buchanan, who presented a thesis in 1931 on “An Experimental Investigation of the Seepage through ModelDikes' Arthur Casagrande, another of Terzaghi's associates, established his own laboratory and courses at Harvard and in 1931 conducted research along similar lines. Others becoming acquainted with soil mechanics, either by direct contact with Terzaghi and his successors or by the extensive literature that was beginning to appear, began to offer instruction in the new subject. In 1936 the First International Conference of Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering was organized at Harvard by Arthur Casagrande. This event might be called the “coming-out party" for the new discipline. It brought together over 200 workers from 20 countries; the Proceedings of the conference became one of the major sources for instruction and practice in Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering; and Terzaghi set the tone and direction of future progress by his well-known opening address and other discussions during the Conference. It seems rather remarkable in retrospect that there were already substantial laboratories and courses in soil mechanics in major universities throughout the country and throughout the world, only a decade after the appearance of Erdbaumechanik. Prominent among the attendees were representatives of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, one of the first organizations to realize the potential value of the new subject for its work in the construction of dams and levees. Among this group was Spencer Buchanan, who had established and was then in charge of the soil ‘mechanics laboratory of the U. S. Waterways Experiment Station at Vicksburg, Others included Gail Hathaway, Hibbert Hill, Benjamin J. Hough, Jr., Theodore T. Knappen, Thomas A- Middlebrooks, Robert Philippe, and Francis B- Slichter. This is only a partial list, but you will recognize many well-known hames. The Corps of Engineers needed soil mechanics, utilized it and, especially under the regime of Dad Middlebrooks when he was placed in charge of soil mechanics in the Office of Chief of Engineers, supported research of the greatest importance, such as the triaxial testing programs at Harvard and MIT. By no means, however, was soil mechanics universally accepted. many prominent engineers, perhaps turned off by the mathematical formulations and unconvinced that the mechanical and hydraulic properties of such variable natural materials as soils could be reliably evaluated by tests, lost few opportunities to belittle the importance or practicality of the subject. On October 7, 1937, the American Society of Civil Engineers held a symposium on soil mechanics in Boston. Four papers were presented, one by Terzaghi on measurements of settlements of structures inEurope, to which Terzaghi had returned in 1928. Two of the other papers were by representatives of the Corps of Engineers: Spencer Buchanan's paper on "Levees in the Lower Mississippi Valley" and Ben Hough's paper on "Stability of Embankment Foundations". Spencer's paper was a thorough discussion of the side slopes, foundations, and control of seepage of the levee system for which the Corps of Engineers had long been responsible. It indicated the benefits of applying the principles of stability analysis and of soil mechanics in general. Characteristic of the skepticism regarding the subject was a discussion by Mr. A. Streiff, a Vice President of the Ambursen Engineering Corporation, designers and builders of buttress dams. A few quotations from his discussion characterized the feelings of the many engineers unimpressed by the developments. "The method of computing these slopes, described by Mr. Buchanan, does not seem to the writer to offer any better guaranty for their stability than that obtainable by older methods. Unfortunately, the great advances in soil mechanics are confined to the laboratory. The writer disagrees with Mr. Buchanan and feels that, for the present at least, the application of soil mechanics has caused no visible progress in: (1) The art of foundation design; and (2) the methods for computing soil stability. The first has always been quite adequate, and computation methods are as approximate as they ever were. “The practical art of constructing earthwork has been entirely successful since ancient times . . . Among the many dams constructed on soil foundations in modern times may be mentioned the Alcona Dam, built on a fine quicksand foundation 100 ft deep under artesian pressure, and successfully holding 40-ft head since 1923. None of these works needed the modern soils laboratory. “. 4. Soil mechanics, at least to the present, has not visibly enriched the’ 'toolbox' of the practicing engineer. Nevertheless, continued research remains of the greatest importance in spite of the paucity of practical results. . ." Spencer replied politely and mildly, "The writer does not agree with Mr. Streiff in his statement ‘for the Present, at least, the application of soil mechanics has caused no visible progress'. The interest manifested by the Engineering Profession both in the United States and abroad, involving foundations and structural stability of soils, appears more than to substantiate the writer's general attitude as expressed in the basic paper".This was the state of soil mechanics in March 1938 when I knocked at the door of Arthur Casagrande's office for permission to audit his courses in soil mechanics. He was gracious enough to agree, even though he certainly had reservations about the advisability of my entering his classes in the middle of a second semester. For me the timing was fortunate, because it gave me the opportunity to work in Casagrande's lab during the summer when there were few other students to assist him. In the fall, Terzaghi arrived, having left Vienna without most of his possessions, while under pressure to join the Nazi war effort. His entry into the United States was made possible by guaranties from Casagrande and from A. E. Cummings, then Chicago District Manager of the Raymond Concrete Pile Company, that he would be an asset to the country. Harvard provided him a small office where it was rumored he was working on a book. Save for a few lectures, we students rarely caught a glimpse of him. Knowing that the City of Chicago was about to embark on the construction of its first subway, Al Cummings arranged for Terzaghi to deliver a lecture in that city. He chose to talk on the danger of building subways in soft clays beneath large cities. After the lecture he found his services in demand by both the City and by the Property Owners Association. As conditions for his retention he required establishing a laboratory, carrying out a boring and testing program, and placing this work under the supervision of a man whom he would select. When the City agreed to meet these conditions, Terzaghi suddenly realized that he had no such person in mind. Since I was an irregular student not taking Casagrande's courses for credit, it was my good fortune to be selected, and within a week my wife and I were established in Chicago. Thus began an association that remained active throughout Terzaghi's lifetime. A few anecdotes will illustrate how he worked and how he brought soil mechanics to maturity. Before I left for Chicago, Terzaghi called me into his office and abruptly asked me what tests I proposed to run in the laboratory. Indeed, I had not thought about the subject and had no idea. I suggested determining water contents and Atterberg limits, and perhaps making some consolidation tests. Terzaghi nodded his agreement and then asked, “What about unconfined compression tests?" I was a bit surprised, because these tests were not part of. the laboratory curriculum at Harvard, and I had the impression they were considered a bit old-fashioned. 1 probably looked puzzled, whereupon Terzaghi commented that in the soft Chicago clays settlement adjacent to thetunneling might be the major problem, and that he thought there would be a relationship between the settlement and the stiffness of the clay. The stiffness would be reflected in the unconfined compressive strength. Indeed, since the unconfined compression tests could be carried out very rapidly, the routine laboratory investigation of the thousands of Shelby tube samples taken for the project became the backbone of the investigation. It quickly became evident that settlements were generally larger where the clay was softer, and we soon saw a rough quantitative relationship between the strength of the clay and the effect of tunneling on overlying streets and adjacent buildings. The first sections of the subway were constructed somewhat outside the downtown region, and our tests showed that the compressive strengths in the downtown area were substantially lower than those where the first tunnels were excavated. It seemed evident that the movements, which were substantial in some of the outlying areas, would be too great to be tolerated if the same tunneling techniques were used downtown. Consequently, it was decided that, in contrast to the hand-mined methods used outside the business district, shield tunneling would be required in the downtown area. This was a major decision; shield tunneling had not previously been used in Chicago. ‘The decision was based, not on any theory, but simply on experience elsewhere and on the observed general correlation between strength and the effects of tunneling. The settlements associated with tunneling were at first considered to be somewhat mysterious, especially by the contractors who steadfastly insisted that their underground operations could not be the cause of any surface effects. As soon as our soil laboratory was organized, Terzaghi suggested that we should try to measure movements inside the tunnel during the advance of the heading and to correlate this information with the settlements on the street surface. On Terzaghi's next trip we presented him with a diagram showing the details of the mining operation for a 72-hour period, settlements of the street surface measured at four-hour intervals at cross-sections 20 feet apart in the vicinity of the heading, and measurements of the inward movement of the clay both laterally and vertically, as soon as it was exposed by the excavation. We drove steel points ahead of the working face in such a way that we could measure their inward movement toward the tunnel as the face advanced. We also kept detailed records of the advance of mining in each of the drifts into which the headings were divided, as wellas of the time and method of installation of bracing and lining. Terzaghi was obviously more than pleased with the results, although he suggested a number of improvements we could make the next time we carried out such a test. The results, crude as they were, showed that the volume of the inward ‘squeeze and volume of settlement of the street surface were approximately equal, and thus established a connection between excavation | methods and adjacent movements. At first the contractors resisted our interference, but before long even they began to make similar measurements for their own guidance. ‘The value of the observations became apparent at the interface between Contracts S-5 and S-6, the first and last of the hand-mined subway contracts. The settlements above the first contract in the middle of the street were on the order of a foot; those above the last were less than three inches. Many people interested in soil mechanics came to visit the subway construction, including Spencer Buchanan. My diary for Wednesday, March 6, 1940, reads, "Showed Buchanan of U.S. Army Engineers $6 and pressure section in morning, with Knapp showing him D-1 shields and various settlement records in afternoon". The entries for Friday and Saturday, March @ and 9, read "Ill at home with flu". This is an occasion I will long remember. After I showed Spencer the test section that we had installed in Contract S-6, I decided it would be quicker to come out of the tunnels through an emergency air lock on the street surface near the end of the contract, because it was a long walk back to the main locks. The emergency lock was a steel tank on the ground surface, reached through a shaft with a ladder in it. Spencer and I climbed the ladder and shut the lock door, and I proceeded to reduce the air pressure so that we could emerge. As you know, when air pressure is reduced under these conditions, the temperature falls, and it became very cold in the lock. Furthermore, on that early day in March, the outside temperature was well below freezing. As I lowered the air pressure, Spencer began to have pains in his ears, so I went through the procedure of raising the pressure a little, lowering it a little more, raising it again, and gradually working our way down to atmospheric pressure, all the time getting colder. We finally got out of the lock, and I deposited Spencer downtown with my boss, Ray Knapp, who was to show him the shield tunneling. The 45 minutes it took us to get out of the lock, starting from the warm humid atmosphere of the tunnel itself, left me with a bad cold that turned into the flu - the only time that I can recall that I ever missed =owork on the subway project. Some time later I asked Spencer if he had any trouble afterward, and he said he had no ill effects whatsoever. For that reason, among others, Spencer's visit stood out in my recollection. I must confess that I never quite forgave him for his touchy ears. During the course of subway construction, Terzaghi wrote a number of memoranda containing suggestions for additional observations and for improving construction Procedures. He asked innumerable questions that could be answered only by measurements in the field. In his discussions with the laboratory crew and with the design and construction forces he made many suggestions for improvements. Throughout this period, which lasted nearly two years, I cannot recall his making a single theoretical calculation. He suggested and we attempted numerous correlations among soil properties, geometry, and effects of tunneling, and with the aid of the correlations we began to feel that we understood cause and effect; the understanding came about exclusively as a result of detailed observations and measurements. Near the end of the project, when all the data had been assembled, condensed into working memoranda, and described in almost daily correspondence with Terzaghi, he settled down to study all the information. The result was his paper on liner plate tunnels of the Chicago subway, published in the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers. While he was writing the paper, he bombarded me with questions about gaps in the data we had furnished, about statements in our memoranda, and about information that might be in our files that had not come to his attention. The questions indicated that he was turning over in his mind every piece of data that we had obtained. The paper, which condensed the experience, also contained for the first time a simple and straightforward theory for calculating the stability of liner-plate tunnels in soft clay, for determining the amount of air pressure necessary to achieve the stability, and thus for making the decision whether shield tunneling might be required to prevent excessive movements or instability. I present this example as being totally characteristic of Terzaghi's approach as soil mechanics began to mature. Theory came last, not first. What counted was reliable and pertinent information from the field with respect to both soil properties and behavior, the development of correlations among the various variables observed, and the understanding of the basic phenomena involved. Theory was a product of the phenomena observed, not the starting point. -.l-During this same period, Terzaghi was writing his first major book in English, “Theoretical Soil Mechanics". Because he undertook this book before writing a treatise on applied soil mechanics, some engineers had the impression that Terzaghi considered theory to be of higher priority. These engineers either did not believe or did not read the Preface in which ‘Terzaghi wrote “For the author, theoretical soil mechanics never was an end in itself. Most of his efforts have been devoted to the digest of field experiences and to the development of the technique of the application of our knowledge of the physical properties of soils to practical problems. Even his theoretical investigations have been made exclusively for the purpose of clarifying some practical issues." Al Cummings and I, in Chicago, were among several people whom Terzaghi asked to review his manuscript as it developed. I remember particularly a section in the chapter entitled “Earth Pressure on Temporary Supports in Cuts, Tunnels, and Shafts". Terzaghi had presented a detailed theory for the equilibrium of sand adjoining the walls of a vertical shaft located above water table, including the distribution of pressure against the supports of the shaft. No corresponding theory existed for shafts in clay, so Terzaghi undertook to develop one. It was rather complex, and both Al and I objected to it on the basis that it was somewhat speculative. Terzaghi refined it, but retained it. Then, one cold New Year's Day in Chicago, Sidney Berman and I had the opportunity to make measurements of the loads in the horizontal rings supporting the lining of a deep shaft in soft Chicago clay. They disagreed with the predictions of Terzaghi's theory. When he saw the data he promptly replaced the complex article in his manuscript by a single paragraph in small print which included the statement "However, a study of the problem on this basis showed that the errors are likely to be excessive". Characteristic of Terzaghi, he discarded the theory, not with regret but with pleasure, because he was ‘guided by the facts. Also characteristically, he utilized the observations to detect the reasons for the flaws in the theory. As we have seen, the early years of adolescence of soil mechanics were marked by open skepticism by such practitioners as Mr. Streiff in his discussion of Spencer Buchanan's paper on levees along the lower Mississippi. Gradually, however, evidence mounted that, at least in some previously troublesome problems of considerable importance, soil mechanics worked. Much of the evidence was assembled by research workers who investigated failures that had -12-already occurred. After a footing on clay in Scotland experienced a bearing-capacity failure under a known load, Skempton demonstrated in 1942 by making borings and undrained shear tests that the simple, classical bearing-capacity formula for a purely cohesive material would have predicted the failure correctly. Similar studies by Nixon in 1949 arrived at the same conclusion regarding the failure of an oil-storage tank at Shellhaven, and by Prank Bryant and myself in 1953 regarding the classical bearing-capacity failure of the Transcona grain elevator that occurred in Winnipeg in 1913. Similarly, studies of undrained slope failures in soft clay, as summarized by Skempton and Golder at the Rotterdam conference in 1948, or Ireland's analysis of the 1952 Congress Street cut, clearly showed the reliability of the analyses. While some problems, such as those arising in stiff clays, initially proved less tractable, the practical usefulness of soil mechanics was rarely questioned as the subject approached the stage of maturity. MATURITY During the period 1942-1948, Terzaghi and I were engaged in writing "Soil Mechanics in Engineering Practice". The story of the development of this manuscript has been told elsewhere. I shall make today only a few comments particularly pertinent to this lecture. After completion of the Chicago subway work, Terzaghi and I collaborated on a number of jobs on which, essentially, it was my duty to keep personal track of the work, to organize the observations to be made, to collect and digest the data, and to furnish periodic summary memoranda to Terzaghi. He reviewed the information, quizzed me about details, visited the projects when he considered it necessary, and usually prepared the final recommendations. We found this a very satisfactory arrangement; certainly it was a series of golden opportunities for me as a young engineer. We seemed to work well together on this basis, and we undertook the preparation of a book on applied soil mechanics on a somewhat similar plan. He was to supply a rough manuscript covering much of the text, and I was to fill in gaps, perfect the organization, and see that the work was in good English. As I received portions of the text, my enthusiasm was boundless. Tt was obvious to me that the book would establish soil mechanics as a major component of civil engineering. When I returned the revised manuscript to him for his approval, his reaction was an unpleasant surprise. -13-He wrote "I started working on your text, but I have to spend far more time on it than I anticipated. What you have sent to me is not a ripe manuscript. It is a crude draft . . ." He emphasized that I needed to spend much more time on the language, which he said was not nearly as good as my ordinary business correspondence. So I tried again. The results were not much better. Our mutual frustrations grew, but eventually it became apparent that the real difficulty was not in the language but in the lack of a consistent rationale for the subject. The text was a collection of useful and interesting information, but it lacked a philosophy, particularly with respect to such day-to-day problems of the geotechnical engineer as foundation or retaining-wall design. After much painful assessment, it rather suddenly came to our minds that much of the practice of foundation and earthwork engineering actually had a quite satisfactory empirical basis, sometimes stretching back for generations, and that this empirical basis contained a vast amount of knowledge that the engineer could and still should use. Soil mechanics could point out the circumstances under which the body of empirical knowledge might be unreliable and could furnish the means for coping with problems for which traditional practice would be unsuitable. We realized, for example, that retaining walls were being designed by essentially empirical procedures, although the calculations appeared to be based on earth pressure theories, theories that led to designs that had been successful in the past. The function of soil mechanics was to indicate the circumstances under which the empirical procedures were valid, and to provide means for designing walls under circumstances not compatible with the empirical rules. Similar considerations applied to footing and, in some instances, to pile foundations. With the role of soil mechanics thus clarified and the manuscript again revised accordingly, Terzaghi in a happy inspiration chose for the title, "Soil Mechanics in Engineering Practice", a title that reflected the maturity of the subject. Terzaghi made every job a learning experience, an attitude that is unfortunately not so widespread today as might be. The periods of greatest satisfaction to him were those in which he settled down to digest one of his jobs, to extract from it what had been learned, and to note whether the field behavior disclosed something at variance with the best predictions that could be made. He often commented that he learned little from experiences that agreed with his predictions. It was the exceptions that provided food for further thought and investigation, and that advanced the knowledge of soil mechanics. -14-In the last few years of his life, Terzaghi became immersed in the simultaneous design and construction of Mission Dam, subsequently named Terzaghi Dam, in British Columbia. It was one of his most difficult assignments. Even though confined to his home after several serious operations, he continued to work vigorously on his final evaluation, and completed, with his young associate Yves Lacroix, his last technical paper. I am confident that the necessity he felt to complete that paper, the digest of his final and most challenging task, prolonged his life. He would not have dared to leave it unfinished. EPILOGUE I hope this talk has given you a glimpse of the man who did so much to cceate the profession that gave Spencer Buchanan, myself, and countless other engineers a challenging and satisfying life work. To the end, he guided the profession by example. His method of working, to let Nature speak for itself through careful observations and measurements, should provide guidance for all of us. It is a vital and necessary approach, even in this day when our ability to make calculations vastly exceeds that which existed in Terzaghi's time. I am sure Terzaghi would have been pleased to be relieved of the drudgery of calculations, but I am egually sure that he would have continued to insist that careful observation and understanding of the physical phenomena are the court of last resort.