Georgia Tech Digitizes George F. Sowers' 1940s Harvard Notes from Terzaghi and Casagrande

The Georgia Tech Geosystems group has released digital scans of course notes taken by Prof. George F. Sowers during his graduate studies at Harvard University in the late 1940s, offering the geotechnical community a rare, firsthand look at the field's founding era.

Sowers took the notes as a student in three courses taught by Karl Terzaghi and Arthur Casagrande: Soil Mechanics, Applied Soil Mechanics, and Engineering Geology. Terzaghi, widely regarded as the father of modern soil mechanics, and Casagrande, his longtime collaborator and the developer of the Casagrande liquid limit device still used in laboratories today, were shaping the discipline's fundamentals at Harvard at the time. Sowers completed his M.S. there in 1947 after wartime service in the U.S. Navy, then joined Georgia Tech, where he built the school's geotechnical engineering program from the ground up and went on to become a Regents Professor. His textbook, Introductory Soil Mechanics and Foundations, later became standard reading for generations of civil engineers, and he delivered the Terzaghi Lecture, one of the profession's highest honors.

The notes themselves, handwritten and richly detailed, are described by colleagues as "works of art" that document the reasoning of two of the discipline's founders as they worked through problems that still underpin practice today. They offer a window into how soil mechanics was taught and understood before it hardened into the standardized curriculum familiar to today's engineers.

Georgia Tech's announcement placed the notes in their historical moment, courtesy of Michael Bennett: in the fall of 1946, as Sowers began this coursework, Ted Williams and the Red Sox were losing a heartbreaking Game 7 of the World Series to the Cardinals, and Cambridge had just elected fellow Navy veteran John F. Kennedy to Congress. The following spring, Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color line playing against the Braves in Brooklyn — the same Braves franchise that would later relocate to Atlanta, in a sense following Sowers to Georgia Tech.

The scanning effort was led by Shaivan Shivaprakash and Yongjoon Choe of the Georgia Tech Geosystems group, with review from officers of the ASCE Georgia Geo-Institute chapter.

The three sets of notes are available for free download from the Georgia Tech Burns Lab's GeoResources page:

Access the full collection here