Harry Bolton Seed
Harry Bolton Seed ( born August 19, 1922 in Bolton (Greater Manchester ), England; † 23 April 1989) was a British civil engineer, who taught a long time at the University of California, Berkeley, Geotechnical Engineering and in the U.S. as a leading expert on earthquake issues was in geotechnics.
He attended Farnworth Grammar School and studied ( after he had seriously considered for a while to become a professional soccer player and served as a lieutenant in World War II ) with a scholarship in civil engineering at the University of London. In 1944, he received his bachelor's degree and in 1947 he received his doctorate with a thesis in structural engineering. After two years of residency at Kings College in London, he went to the United States to specialize in the leading geotechnical engineers Karl von Terzaghi and Arthur Casagrande at Harvard University on soil mechanics. After graduating in 1948 he was one year Instructor at Harvard and then worked as a civil engineer in Boston reason at Thomas Worcester Inc. From 1950 he was at the University of Berkeley, where he established the Geotechnical Engineering faculty and made it one of the leading in the country. 1965 to 1971 he was faced with the Civil Department.
Seed applies his research (in particular stimulated by the devastating Alaska quake of 1964 ) as the father of Earthquake Engineering. His investigations, for example, on soil liquefaction ( liquefaction ) and soil-structure interaction during earthquakes led to fundamental readjustments and improvements to the building codes in the United States. To this end, he examined the damage patterns, for example, the aforementioned Alaskabebens, the San Fernando earthquake of 1971 in California ( and the damage caused thereby Dammrutschungen ), the failure of the Teton Dam in 1976, the landslide in the port of Nice in 1979 or the earthquake in Mexico City in 1985. He was the world to improve the earthquake resistance of many construction projects, such as dams such as the Aswan dam or nuclear power plants involved.
He has received numerous awards from the ASCE, including the Terzaghi price. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering ( 1970), Honorary Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (1985 ), member of the National Academy of Sciences (1986) and honorary member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (1988). In 1987 he received his first honorary doctorate, awarded the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et the Chaussees in Paris.
In 1968 he held the Terzaghi Lecture ( Landslides falling on Earthquakes due to liquefaction ) and 1979 Rankine Lecture ( Considerations in the earthquake - resistant design of earth and rockfill dams, Geotechnique, Volume 29, 1979, pp. 215-63 ).
He was married and had a daughter and a son, who also was a geotechnical engineer at the University of Berkeley.
In his honor, awarded the ASCE H. Bolton Seed Medal.