Victor Hugo BENIOFF

{geni:about_me} ==Biography==

'''Dr. Hugo Benioff Ph.D.''' was born on September 14, 1899 in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, United States. His parents were [https://www.geni.com/profile-87776424 Simon Benioff] and [https://www.geni.com/profile-87750675 Aufrida Georgina Benioff (Widerquist Weiderquist)]. He was a Geophysicist, Seismologist .

Victor married [https://www.geni.com/profile-88335395 Alice Pauline Silverman] in 1928 and they divorced in 1953. Together they had the following children:

[https://www.geni.com/profile-88335951 Paul Anthony Benioff];

[https://www.geni.com/profile-87776793 Dagmar Anne Friedman (Benioff)];

[https://www.geni.com/profile-88338279 Elena Slusser (Benioff)].

Victor married [https://www.geni.com/profile-3065893 Mildred Benioff (Lent)] in 1953. Together they had the following children:

[https://www.geni.com/profile-3065908 Martha Gwen Benioff].

He died on February 29, 1968 in Mendocino, Mendocino County, California, United States from heart attack.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Victor Hugo Benioff (September 14, 1899 – February 1, 1968) was an American seismologist and a professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is best remembered for his work in charting the location of deep earthquakes in the Pacific Ocean.

Benioff was born in Los Angeles. His father was an immigrant from Russia and his mother from Sweden. After graduating from Pomona College in 1921, Benioff began his career with the idea of being an astronomer and worked for a time at Mount Wilson Observatory, but when he found that astronomers work at night and sleep in the daytime, he quickly switched to seismology. He joined the Seismological Laboratory in 1924 and received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1935.

Benioff is considered a genius in the design of earthquake instruments. One of his first instruments, created in 1932, was the Benioff seismograph, which senses the movement of the earth - these instruments are now used in every country in the world. Equally famous is the Benioff strain instrument, which records the stretching of the Earth's surface. One of his most recent accomplishments was a refined version of the old Benioff seismometer which has given seismologists more knowledge about the cause of very deep earthquakes.

Benioff noticed that earthquake sources get deeper under the overriding tectonic plate proceeding away from the trench at a subduction zone. He realized that this inclined array of earthquake sources indicate the position of the portion of the plate that has already been subducted. Thus, that pattern of earthquakes is known as a Wadati-Benioff zone.

From the early 1930s, Benioff also worked on creating electric musical instruments; in particular a piano, violin and cello. He continued developing these instruments for the rest of his life, working for over two decades with pianist Rosalyn Tureck and also, towards the end of his life with the Baldwin Piano Company. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958.

'''American National Biography Online'''

Benioff, Victor Hugo (14 Sept. 1899-29 Feb. 1968), seismologist

and geophysicist, was born in Los Angeles, California, the son

of Simon Benioff, a tailor, and Alfrieda Widerquist. Benioff's

father and mother were immigrants, from Russia and Sweden respectively.

Benioff attended the public schools of Los Angeles and Long Beach,

where he expressed an early interest in science. As a youth,

he was particularly interested in astronomy. From 1917 until

1921, while pursuing his undergraduate studies at Pomona College,

he spent his summers working as an assistant at the Mount Wilson

Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles. After

receiving his A.B., he accepted a job at the Lick Observatory

in Santa Cruz, California, where he worked from 1921 to 1922.

Working full time as an astronomer, however, Benioff was troubled

by his intolerance for the cold, nocturnal work required to observe

the stars. As a result, in 1924 he secured a position with the

Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena, California, one of the

leading centers of the emerging study of seismology, then run

by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. As an assistant

physicist at the lab, Benioff was assigned the task of developing

a system to drive seismological recording drums. He soon proved

himself an able instrument builder, developing a new impulse

motor that could measure the arrival times of seismic waves to

an accuracy of .1 second. This instrument was the first of many

Benioff developed during the course of a career that transformed

seismology from a mostly qualitative study of the effects of

earthquakes on man-made structures into a detailed, quantitative

science focused on the recording and analysis of seismic wave

energy. As a result of his work at the lab, Benioff decided to

pursue seismology as a career. He began graduate study in seismology

at the California Institute of Technology and in 1935 received a Ph.D.

Not satisfied with his early instrumental improvements, Benioff

continued to strive for ways to further enhance the precision

and sensitivity of seismographs. In 1931 he finished work on

a variable-reluctance seismometer that allowed for extremely

high magnification of small seismic movements. This feature enabled

the instrument to measure both small local earthquakes and larger,

distant ones. Benioff next worked on perfecting a linear strain

seismograph. By responding to ground motions in a different manner

from that of the traditional pendulum seismometer, Benioff's

instrument allowed for the detection of different types of seismic

waves, especially those generated by deep-focus earthquakes.

Benioff's instruments soon were incorporated into a network of

linked recording instruments throughout southern California that

gave researchers at the Pasadena laboratory the ability to precisely

pinpoint and gauge the relative magnitude of local earthquakes.

This network contributed to many new insights into earthquake

mechanics and led directly to the development, by Benioff's Caltech

colleagues Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg, of what came to

be known as "the Richter scale" in 1935. This scale provided

a method of ranking the intensity of different ground motions

based on a logarithmic scheme, generating a single number that

could represent the relative size of earthquakes.

In 1937 the Pasadena Seismological Lab was officially joined

to the California Institute of Technology; Benioff was appointed

to the position of assistant professor of seismology at Caltech

and was soon afterward raised to associate professor. Although

a member of the regular faculty, Benioff preferred his work on

instruments to teaching and had relatively little formal contact

with students. Researchers and graduate students sought him out,

however, for his insight into the particular problems of instrumentation

and the detection of seismic waves. During the Second World War,

Benioff participated in a program for improving radar and sonar

detection for the Submarine Signal Corporation, and during the

1950s he took part in a program for the detection of underground

nuclear explosions.

During the 1940s Benioff's interests in the transmission of

waves also led him to develop electronic amplifiers for the violin

and cello. These "seismographic fiddles" had the same design

as their conventional counterparts, except that the wooden resonance

chambers were replaced by a small, aluminum container beneath

the strings. Within this compartment, the musical vibrations

caused a crystal to generate electrical current, which was then

amplified. Benioff's instruments were hailed for producing tones

of outstanding clarity and depth. From 1946 to 1962 Benioff worked

as a consultant with the Baldwin Piano Company and helped them

to develop electronic instruments, including a violin and a piano,

based on the same principles. In his home, Benioff constructed

an elaborate system of recording equipment and built a superb

library of recordings. He also developed a means whereby the

seismic waves of earthquakes could be played back on an audio

system, allowing researchers to actually "hear" the sound of earthquakes.

Benioff also won acclaim for his contribution to a prediction

made in 1949 by Beno Gutenberg, director of the Caltech seismological

lab, that the Pacific Coast region was due for either a large

earthquake or a series of small tremors. This prediction was

based on measurements made by Benioff revealing that the subsurface

strain in the central California region was building. In 1950

a series of tremors shook the lower Imperial Valley, and in 1952

a major quake took place in the region.

Later in his career Benioff became interested in the study of

microseismic waves, the slight shaking of the earth's crust that

goes on continually. He also worked on magnetic micropulsations,

which are small geomagnetic fluctuations in the earth's magnetic

field. These researches led to his work on detecting the free

vibrations of the earth. Benioff's broad interests and contributions

to seismology won him widespread recognition in the field. In

1950 he became a full professor at Caltech, and in 1953 he was

elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He also served as

the president of the Seismological Association of America. In

1964 Benioff became professor emeritus at Caltech but continued

his research and consulting work. He served as adviser to both

the government and private industry on issues of the seismic

safety of nuclear power plants. During his career he published

many significant papers on seismography, microseisms, and earthquake

dynamics.

Benioff was married twice. His first marriage, to Alice Silverman,

in 1928 produced three children. They divorced in 1953. That

same year he married Mildred Lent, with whom he had one child.

Benioff was a great lover of nature and the outdoors. Following

his retirement, he moved to Cape Mendocino in northern California

to enjoy the beauty of the natural environment of that area.

While there, he died suddenly of a heart attack. His contributions

to seismology, especially in the development of seismic instruments,

made him one of the founding figures of the modern study of earthquakes.

Bibliography

Biographical information on Benioff can be found in the historical

files and in several oral history interviews in the archives

at the California Institute of Technology. Among Benioff's most

significant scientific papers were his descriptions of his new

seismographs published during the 1930s in the Bulletin of the

Seismological Society of America. A good summary of these developments

is Benioff's "Seismological Instruments Developed at the C.I.T.,"

Engineering and Science 11 (Feb. 1948): 24-25, 31. A biography

of Benioff by Frank Press is in the National Academy of Sciences,

Biographical Memoirs 43 (1973): 27-40. The best survey to date

on the development of seismology in America is Judy Goodstein,

"Waves in the Earth: Seismology Comes to Southern California,"

Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 14 (1984): 201-30.

An obituary is in the New York Times, 2 Mar. 1968.

David A. Valone

From American National Biography, published by Oxford University

Press, Inc., copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.

Further information is available at http://www.anb.org.

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