Hello to the list. I have a long-standing, latent interest in amateur seismology which was recently awakened by and exchange with a gentleman seeking information on communicating by microcontrollers with a remote seismograph. What follows is an extracted description of the history of my interest that was taken from a recent exchange with a fellow microcontroller designer. ***************************************** Hi xxxxx -- Seismometry is a subject that has been dear to my heart for many years. I would be very interested in learning about your unit. Is it described in available literature anywhere? Especially on the Web?. Background -- My mothers sister married late in life to a very interesting gentleman by the name of Mr. Elmer Rexin. He was the plant engineer at the Nunn-Bush shoe company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for most of his adult life. Somewhere back in the '50's or thereabouts, the USGS was conducting water table surveys of deep wells in the area and placed a float and drum recorder in one of the deep wells in the Nunn-Bush factory. During the period of recording Uncle Elmer noticed that certain anomalous squiggles on their recordings corresponded to major seismic events that had made the news at the time. After the USGS packed up their equipment and left, my Uncle built an improved, much more sensitive recorder and, with the blessing of Nunn-Bush, proceeded to monitor the disturbances. The correlation with seismic activity was immediately evident and the instrument proved to exhibit exceptional sensitivity. This phenomenal well has been investigated by various scientists and a theory of operation was formed. It was hypothesized that the deep well had tapped into a large underground cavern of water and the well casing behaved as the tube of a very large inverted syringe - thus amplifying the slightest disturbance in bed rock formations. The work has been written up in various journals, unfortunately I cannot remember any of the references. Somewhere at my family home in Illinois there are dozens of rolls of paper with pen squiggles on them marking various events over the years. They were salvaged by my family after my Aunt and Uncle passed away in the '80's. ***************************************************** I am making this posting in hopes that someone here on this public network may know of this work and can point me to any of the reports that were published in the past. Many thanks and good squiggles to all, Bob Smith -- --------- Avoid computer viruses -- Practice safe hex ------------- * * Specializing in small, cost effective embedded control systems * * Robert L. (Bob) Smith Smith Machine Works, Inc. internet bobsmith5@.............. Lumlay Road landline 804/745-1065 Richmond, Virginia 23236+1004 __________________________________________________________ Public Seismic Network Mailing List (PSN-L)
Larry Cochrane <cochrane@..............>