Robert Mallet

Robert Mallet was an Irish geophysicist, civil engineer and inventor born June 3, 1810, in Dublin, Ireland, who died November 5, 1881, at Stockwell, London, England, and who graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1830, expanded his father iron foundry into a major Irish engineering firm, was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 1832 at the age of twenty-two, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1854, and relocated to London in 1861 as a consulting engineer, editing The Practical Mechanic Journal. Sometimes called the father of seismology, he presented the seminal paper On the Dynamics of Earthquakes in 1846, coined terms including seismology, epicentre and isoseismal map, investigated the 1857 Great Neapolitan earthquake using photography, and published The Earthquake Catalogue of the British Association in 1858 with his son John and the two-volume Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857 in 1862. He received the Telford Medal in 1859, the Cunningham Medal in 1862, and the Wollaston Medal in 1877.