From San Francisco to Naples: JR Freeman and Pioneering work in earthquake engineering

In December 1931 John Ripley Freeman completed one of the earliest monographs to deal specifically with earthquakes from an engineering point of view. His sixty year career had taken him from an engineering office in Lawrence, Massachusetts to many parts of the world where earthquakes threaten communities. Freeman's legacy is manifold and will be explored in depth in this paper, centred on (i) his pioneering work to obtain improved engineering data for design against earthquake actions; (ii) his unstinting efforts to promote the development of earthquake engineering in the USA both through lobbying government officials and educating fellow practitioners to improve human safety through safer building design and (iii) his openness to new ideas and methods in earthquake engineering from around the world, and his important role, in particular, in popularising the work of earthquake engineering practitioners in Japan and Italy, to the Anglophone world.