Harry Bolton Seed

Harry Bolton Seed

Harry Bolton Seed (born August 19, 1922 in Bolton (Greater Manchester) , England ; † April 23, 1989 ) was a British civil engineer who taught geotechnics for a long time at the University of California, Berkeley , and in the USA as a leading expert on earthquake issues was true in geotechnical engineering.

He attended Farnworth Grammar School and (after seriously considering becoming a professional footballer for a while and serving as a lieutenant in World War II) studied civil engineering at the University of London on a scholarship . In 1944 he made his bachelor's degree and in 1947 he received his doctorate, with a thesis in structural engineering. After two years as an assistant at Kings College in London, he went to the USA to specialize in soil mechanics with the leading geotechnical engineers Karl von Terzaghi and Arthur Casagrande at Harvard University . After graduating in 1948, he was an instructor at Harvard for a year and then worked as a civil engineer in Boston at Thomas Worcester Inc. From 1950 he was at Berkeley University, where he built up the geotechnical faculty and made it one of the leading in the country. From 1965 to 1971 he was head of the civil engineering faculty.

Seed is considered the father of Earthquake Engineering through his research (especially inspired by the devastating Alaska quake of 1964) . His investigations into, for example, soil liquefaction and soil-structure interaction during earthquakes led to fundamental adjustments and improvements in building regulations in the USA. To this end, he examined the damage patterns, for example, of the aforementioned Alaska quake, the San Fernando earthquake of 1971 in California (and the dam slides it caused), the failure of the Teton Dam in 1976, the slide in the port of Nice in 1979 or the earthquake in Mexico City 1985. He was involved in improving the earthquake safety of numerous construction projects around the world, for example dams such as the Aswan Dam or nuclear power plants.

He has received numerous awards from the ASCE, including the Terzaghi Prize. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1970), an honorary member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (1985), a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1986) and an honorary member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (1988). In 1987 he received the first honorary doctorate awarded by the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees in Paris.

In 1968 he gave the Terzaghi Lecture (Landslides during Earthquakes due to liquefaction) and in 1979 the Rankine Lecture (Considerations in the earthquake-resistant design of earth and rockfill dams, Geotechnique, Vol. 29, 1979, pp. 215-63).

He was married with a daughter and a son who also became a geotechnical engineer at Berkeley University.

The ASCE awards the H. Bolton Seed Medal in his honor.

Web links

• Biography at the National Academy of Sciences by James K. Mitchell