The father of seismology By Rafael Epstein The Age - March 18, 2011 Mansfield doctor William Twycross remembers his great-uncle John Milne's pioneering work on quakes. The English-born Milne was the first to scientifically measure tremors so that he could delineate the earthquake fault line near Japan's east coast, one of many feats that clearly impressed Dr Twycross. "He was quite an extraordinary man, a watercolour artist, an ornithologist, an archaeologist, a very inventive geographer, an inventor, and he played the piano very well, very much a man of the people," he says. Milne was a remarkable character. He tried measuring tremors by hanging weights off wires and springs, observing liquids in beakers to gauge tilting and even detonating dynamite in a mine until "a ton of earth came down . . . flattening both me and the instrument, bringing the experiment to an untimely end". Eventually Milne devised a simple and elegant tool to standardise measurements: the world's first continuously recording seismograph. He persuaded Japan's Meiji Restoration-era postal service to send hundreds of these seismographs to telegraph stations around the nation. He compiled recordings of tremors from diverse locations, and could then plot the fault line we now know as the Pacific Ring of Fire. Read more: http://bit.ly/1JHac5z