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| Environmental and Engineering Geoscience |  |
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1 10256 Stoltz Drive, Rolla, MO 65401
It is appropriate to applaud yet another gift from Professor Ralph B. Peck to the profession, rather than to dwell on the man and his prominence in engineering. There are two general associations by which Dr. Peck has influenced our profession: (1) more narrowly, through his own engineer-student alumni of the University of Illinois; and, (2) more broadly among practicing engineers and geologists who have come to know, value, and follow the Peck teachings.
This review flows from the latter camp, a place where Dr. Peck is widely recognized for his ultimately practical engineering wisdom. He cannot help but be a genuine hero to geological practitioners who have learned from his writings and from occasional attendance at his lectures and oral papers. We geologists see him mainly in the light of his remarkable ability to detect and grasp the practical essentials and then, with the true calling of a great engineer, to pass his own proven lessons-learned on to us. Regrettably, however, this tribute is devoid of commentary by the many geologists who have crossed Ralph Peck's path over the years.
In his own humble words, Peck recalls his chance meeting on a geological field trip (early 1930s) of Winifred Goldring, a geological curator at the New York State Geological Museum in Albany. Previous to this point, Peck, the developing structural (bridge) engineer, had only a ripening curiosity about geology. He recalls (p. 28) "I think I have to credit her with the interest that I later found in the field of geology in general, without which I certainly could not have progressed very far in soil mechanics."
After suffering a company-wide layoff on his first post-doctoral job (American Bridge Co.) in 1938, Ralph, again by coincidence, was advised that some post-doctoral work with Prof. Arthur Casagrande (Harvard University) would qualify him for a junior faculty position at the Armour Institute of Technology (Chicago). On borrowed money, the newly married Dr. Ralph and wife Marjorie arrived for a year with Casagrande at Cambridge, and there he was placed in charge of the new soil mechanics laboratory. Again chance graced Ralph Peck with the return of Dr. Karl Terzaghi, a refugee from Nazi occupation of his homeland. It had been Terzaghi, one of the great geological engineers of all time, who on an earlier mid-1920s extended visit to the United States, had arranged for his fellow Austrian, Casagrande, to emigrate and to take a faculty position at Harvard.
As an unpaid visiting professor at Harvard, Terzaghi was working on his textbook Theoretical Soil Mechanics (published in 1943) and then was offered consulting employment by admiring engineer friends in Chicago. Terzaghi visited Chicago and inspected his patron's planned new subway ground and had thoroughly "terrorized" them with the soil mechanics implications of their soft-ground tunnel sections. Terzaghi was invited to propose his assistance to the city subway agency, and he advised the establishment of a city soil mechanics laboratory. Terzaghi's proposal was accepted, and he was asked to nominate a laboratory manager. Young Dr. Peck passed Terzaghi's muster as fully qualified, and Peck moved to Chicago, where he worked in the lab during the day and taught at Armour Institute—now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology—at night.
World War II brought Peck more under Terzaghi's influence as the latter was still a visitor from a nation at war with the United States, and although Terzaghi's loyalty to his new country was unquestioned, Peck had to stand in for him at many of his sensitive consulting sites. Late in 1942 Terzaghi guided Peck to an assistant professorship at the University of Illinois as a result of Terzaghi's visiting professorship at that institution. Of course, many of us proudly own a copy of one or more of the three editions (1948, 1967, 1995) of their collaboration known as Soil Mechanics in Engineering Practice.
About a third of this reviewed book is based on Peck's Self Portrait, brought together by his two editors. Most of these recollections are project- or event-related, and experienced geologists will enjoy reading these revelations. Nearly all of the problematic conditions will conjure the reader's own geological explanations for the situations that confronted Dr. Peck, although he does not identify many of the specific geological conditions. Five pages of carefully-picked Peck quotes, taken from his works, by the editors are alone worth the price of the book!
Consider these:
Peck is known as the father of the geotechnical observational method, a refinement of Terzaghi's life teachings, and which is just as applicable to geologic work as it is of geotechnical engineering. About 40 percent of the book reproduces key papers and addresses by Professor Peck, all representing valuable instruction for the reading geologist also. The remainder of the book is devoted to vignette statements by persons more closely affected by actual contact with Dr. Peck; their comments give added understanding of the history and nature of our sister profession.
The rest of the Peck-Illinois association truly is history. Terzaghi, both a geologist and an engineer, strongly influenced Peck, the engineer. Peck never ventured into geologically-oriented writing or teaching, but his reverence for geology as a staple of geotechnical education has never waned. In fact, the Peck era at the University of Illinois produced two generations of very strong-willed leaders of the geotechnical engineering profession. He saw it morph from soil mechanics (pre-1957) to geotechnical engineering, then to a place in the applied geosciences, as represented by the Geo Institute of ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers). It was these Illinois graduates who eventually would come to control the management and ownership of nearly every first-rate geotechnical consulting firm in North America. This was well in place by 1970, then peaked in the 1980s and was largely destroyed by the detrimental effects of bid-shopping, government set-asides, and the fragmentation brought about by the environmental era, all of which was more-or-less complete by 1995. Many engineering geologists entering practice from 1965 to 1995 have been supervised, managed, or partnered by or with Peck's students.
Presently, our profession struggles to teach the technical and ethical values of Peck and Terzaghi, and both are revered as giants by the engineering community. However, many of these very practitioners no longer have their mentors' desired respect or awareness for geologic input to the real world of design and construction of engineered works. Members of AEG (Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists) would be well served to read and digest this comprehensive book on Ralph Peck, who was a member of AEG (Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists) for many of the years of his active teaching.
The driving forces behind the book are Peck's daughter Nancy Peck Young (an artist, not an engineer) and John Dunnicliff (an engineer, but never one of Peck's students). It was they who gathered the evidence of such a rich and productive life, but with a certain detachment that many readers will appreciate. John Dunnicliff, a native and now resident of England, spent most of his career in the United States as our best known solo geotechnical instrumentation engineer and all-around perfectionist. Whereas John has no particular geological expertise and was never a Peck student, his long practice was largely involved with tracking the project impacts of deformation caused by displaceable masses of rock and of the overall effects of gravity and pore/cleft water in host-ground geotechnical performance. Clearly, without the interest, technical background, determination, and dedication of Nancy Peck Young and John Dunnicliff, this remarkable story would not have been recorded.
REFERENCES CITED
Dunnicliff, J., and Young, N.P., 2007, Ralph B. Peck; Educator and Engineer–The Essence of the Man, Bi-Tech Publishing Vancouver, Canada. 350 ISBN 0-9211095-63-5, $99.00.
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