ABSTRACT
The history of seismology taking that term to mean the study, usually chronologically organized, of the systematic investigation of earthquakes is relatively recent and well understood. An awareness of earthquakes and an interest in the Earth's interior were features of intellectual enquiry in Classical Greece and Rome, early China, the Enlightenment in Europe and what would become the United States. The chapter explores the connections between the geographies and the technologies of seismic instrumentation and exploration. The first section briefly considers the local geographies of early seismic instrument making. The principal focus of what follows is upon national-level geographies of seismic investigation and on the relationships between academic institutions and the sites and practices of instrumental manufacture. In the 1960s, much seismic instrumentation and research in the United States was bound up in Vela Unifor. The light-weight broadband seismometers that began to be used in large arrays in the later twentieth century in the United States.
