Karl von Terzaghi (2 October 1883 – 25 October 1963) was an Austrian mechanical engineer, geotechnical engineer, and geologist known as the "father of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering".
Early life In 1883, he was born the first child of Army Lieutenant-Colonel Anton von Terzaghi, of Italian origin, and Amalia Eberle in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic. Upon his father's retirement from the army, the family moved to Graz, Austria. At the age of 10, Terzaghi was sent to a military boarding school, where he developed an interest in astronomy and geography. At the age of 14, Terzaghi entered a different military school, in Hranice, the Crown of Bohemia. He was an excellent student, especially in geometry and mathematics, and graduated with honors at 17. In 1900, Terzaghi entered the Technical University in Graz to study mechanical engineering, where he also developed an interest in theoretical mechanics. He was nearly expelled at one point but ended up graduating with honors in 1904. Terzaghi then fulfilled his compulsory one-year military service. While fulfilling his military obligations, Terzaghi translated a popular English geology field manual into German and greatly expanded it. He returned to the university for one year and combined the study of geology with courses on subjects such as highway and railway engineering. Shortly afterward, he published his first academic paper on the geology of terraces in southern Styria.
Early professional years His first job was as a junior design engineer for the firm Adolph von Pittel, Vienna. The firm was becoming more involved in the relatively new field of hydroelectric power generation, and Karl became involved in the geological problems the firm faced. His responsibilities quickly increased, and by 1908, he was managing a construction site, workers, and the design and construction of steel-reinforced structures. He embarked on a project to construct a hydroelectric dam in Croatia. For six months in Russia, he developed some novel graphical methods for the design of industrial tanks, which he submitted as a thesis for his PhD at the university. In 1912 he travelled to the United States and undertook an engineering tour of major dam construction sites in the West. He used the opportunity to gather reports and firsthand knowledge of the problems of many different projects, and he returned to Austria in December 1913. When World War I broke out, he found himself drafted into the army as an officer directing a 250-man engineering battalion. He eventually led 1,000 men, faced combat in Serbia, and witnessed the fall of Belgrade. After a short stint managing an airfield, he became a professor at the Royal Ottoman College of Engineering in Istanbul (now Istanbul Technical University). There, he began a rigorous study of the properties of soils in an engineering context. Both his measurements and his analysis of the force on retaining walls were first published in English in 1919, and they were quickly recognized as an important new contribution to the scientific understanding of the fundamental behavior of soils. After the war, he was forced to resign his post at the university but managed to find a new post at Robert College in Istanbul, where he switched his teaching language from French to English. He began studying experimental and quantitative aspects of the permeability of soils to water and produced theories to explain the observations. He invented novel equipment as part of the work. In 1924 he published Erdbaumechanik auf Bodenphysikalischer Grundlage (The Mechanics of Earth Construction Based on Soil Physics) which would have a profound impact on the field. That resulted in a job offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which he accepted.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
