A Rare Film of Karl Terzaghi featuring also Casagrande, Ruth Terzaghi, Schaffernak, and Forchheimer

Geoengineer.org is extremely pleased to make available to what is, to date, a rare film featuring Karl & Ruth Terzaghi and colleagues. The original material was provided by Prof. Bengt H. Fellenius on October 2018 as a reel (see picture below). It was professionally digitized and the raw footage, was made available online by Geoengineer.org.  

The video, which has no audio, features an outing involving Karl and Ruth Terzaghi, Arthur Casagrande, Friedrich (Fritz) Schaffernak, and Philipp Forchheimer along with family members. According to Prof. Fellenius, “the first part of the video is from the City of Graz in Austria, while the second part is from an outing along the River Danube near Vienna in 1930.  Schaffernak was then Professor in hydrology at the University of Vienna, and Forchheimer was retired from the same university — Terzaghi's had studied under him. Casagrande, then a student of Terzaghi's, is a very handsome young man of 28 years of age. All can be considered working in the "geotechnical" field and they must have taken time out from their collaborations for the trip. Information on them are given in the book "Karl Terzaghi: The Engineer as Artist" by Richard E. Goodman.”

The video starts with Mrs. Schaffernak, wife of Dr. Schaffernak. At 1:26 Schaffernak and Casagrande appear seated, collaborating over some documents. According to Wikipedia, Casagrande “graduated from the Technische Hochschule (TH) in Vienna with a civil engineering degree in 1924, after which he carried on working there as a full-time assistant to Professor Schaffernak in the hydraulics laboratory.” At 1:41, two women are featured, who may be Schaffernak’s daughters, although that remains unknown. At 2:08, Karl and Ruth Terzaghi are arriving as guests and the group is enjoying a boat ride.  At 2:58, Philipp Forchheimer is having a discussion with Karl Terzaghi. At 3:05 Mrs. Forscheimer is featured, before the video ends.

The reel was originally given by Arthur Casagrande to Brit Mitchell of the Waterways Experiment Station. Back in the late 1980s, Brit gave a copy to Prof. Bengt H. Fellenius, who then in October 2018 provided it to Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos and the Geoengineer.org team to digitize and for archival safe keeping. The reel was digitized and made available in September 2019.

If you have more information on the video, or additional relevant information, please write a comment below, or contact Prof. Zekkos or Geoengineer.org.