Gregory Chebotarioff

Gregory Porphyriewitch Tschebotarioff (born February 15, 1899 in Pavlovsk , † April 22, 1985 in Holland (Pennsylvania) ) was an American civil engineer for geotechnical engineering with Russian roots.

Life

Tschebotarioffs father was an officer in the Guards battery of the Don Cossacks , stationed in Pavlovsk, and his mother was the daughter of a medical officer and friend of the Russian Empress, with this in World War I in Tsarskoye Selo worked as a nurse. He was an artillery lieutenant in the First World War 1916 to 1917 in the Russian Army and then until 1920 with the White Army (Don Army) against the Red Army in the wake of the Russian Revolution . After he lost his parents to typhus and had to look after his sister, he went to Germany to study engineering, which he had already started in Russia. He studied at the TU Berlin , where he graduated in 1925 and received his doctorate. He then worked in structural engineering, among others in Paris, Berlin, Bremen and Cairo. In 1929 he went to Karl von Terzaghi in Vienna and specialized in foundation engineering. He spent seven years as an engineer in Cairo on behalf of the Egyptian government as a civil engineer. In 1936 he took part in the First World Congress for Foundation Engineering and Soil Mechanics at Harvard and was from 1937 at Princeton University , where he set up a soil mechanics laboratory and became a professor of foundation engineering and soil mechanics. In 1964 he retired.

He became known through experiments on retaining walls and bank structures on a large scale, which he carried out for the Office of Naval Research and the Bureau of Yards and Docks. He also performed early ground dynamics experiments for the Civil Aeronautics Administration.

As a university lecturer, he was already active as a consulting engineer and in 1955 became a partner in the engineering office King and Gavaris in New York, where he was responsible for foundation engineering until 1970 and continued to work in an advisory capacity thereafter.

He wrote a soil mechanics textbook widely used in the USA.

In 1941 he became a US citizen. In 1964 he published his memoirs, in which he also published parts of his mother's diary, Valentina Ivanovna Chebotaryova. She died in 1919 of typhus, which she fetched while nursing at the hospital, so that Tschebotarioff had to look after his little sister Valentine, whom he brought to her godmother Sophie von Medum in Berlin. He married Florentine Bill in 1939, whose brother married his sister Valentine.

Since he publicly spoke out in the USA against what he saw as an anti-Russian distortion of Russian history, he ran into difficulties in the McCarthy era despite his service in the White Army.

In 1959 he received an honorary doctorate in Belgium, and in 1977 he became an honorary member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), whose Terzaghi Award he received. In 1976 he gave the Martin Kapp Lecture ( Half a century of soil mechanics ). His estate is at Purdue University , including the manuscript of his last unpublished book Civil Engineering on four continents .

Fonts

• Russia, My Native Land: A US Engineer Reminisces and Looks at the Present , McGraw-Hill, 1964.
• Foundations, Retaining and Earth Structures: The art of design and construction and its scientific basis in soil mechanics , McGraw Hill 1973
• Soil Mechanics, Foundations and Earth Structures: an introduction to the theory and practice of design and construction , McGraw Hill 1951

Web links

• Biography at the ASCE
• Chebotarioff's tombstone

References

1. ↑ He kept the German spelling in the USA, as he was known by this name