A great civil engineer : Gregory P.Tschebotarioff (1899-1985)

Memoir prepared by Gerald A. Leonards, F. ASCE, and Peter T. Gavaris, F. ASCE, 1985

Gregory P. Tschebotarioff, world-renowned for his many contributions to the field of soil mechanics and foundation engineering, died April 22, 1985 in Holland, Pennsylvania. The son of General Porphyry G. Tschebotarioff and Valentina Doubiagsky Tschebotarioff, he was born February 15, 1899 in Pavlosk, Russia. His father was an officer in the Cossack Guard Battery and his mother was a close friend of the Russian Empress and her two daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana Nikolayevna. He graduated from the Imperial Law School in Petrograd, Russia in 1916 and went into the Russian Army until 1917. When the revolution began and the Bolsheviks took power, he joined the Grand Army of the Don and fought with the White Russians against the Red Army until 1920.

His engineering studies which began in Russian were continued in Germany, where he earned the "Diplom-Ingeniuer" degree in 1925 and the "Doktor-Ingenieur" degree in 1952. Structural engineering projects in Paris, Berlin, Bremen, Hamlen and Cairo occupied his attention from 1925 to 1929. In 1929 he began his specialization in soil mechanics research and foundation engineering. For seven years thereafter he specialized in foundation work in the Egyptian Government Service. Since 1936 he participated actively in numerous international conferences on soil mechanics and foundation engineering, including the First International Conference at Harvard, in 1936.

From 1937 through 1964, he was a member of the Princeton University Faculty, where he organized a soil mechanics laboratory and courses on soil and foundation engineering. At Princeton, he also organized and was in charge of pioneering research projects on the effects of vibration on soils for the Civil Aeronautics Administration. His work on large-scale model tests on retaining walls, anchored bulkheads and other waterfront structures for the Bureau of Yards and Docks and for the Office of Naval Research attracted world-wide attention and acclaim.
He married Florence D. Bill of Princeton, New Jersey in 1939.

In his years at Princeton, he wrote many professional papers on soil mechanics. He authored Soil Mechanics, Foundations and Earth Structures, a technical best-selling textbook, and Foundations, Retaining & Earth Structures. He contributed to the McGraw-Hill book Foundation Engineering.

He also wrote the autobiography Russia My Native Land. Though he fought with the White Army during the Russian Revolution, and was a staunch citizen of the United States, he became the victim of harrassment during the McCarthy era when he denounced what he called "the malevolent distortions of Russian history emanating from sources close to our U.S. propaganda policies".

Throughout his teaching career he did consulting work and in 1955 became an Associate of King and Gavaris, Consulting Engineers, where he was in charge of soils and foundation work through 1970.

Dr. Tschebotarioff retired from his professorship in 1964. In 1974, Dr. Tschebotarioff donated his technical library and personal archives to Purdue University. The collection is housed in the Tschebotarioff Library along with a draft manuscript of his last book, Civil Engineering on Four Continents.

He continued his consulting work as an Associate in the regular highway and harbor engineering work of King and Gavaris and conducted investigations for other consulting engineers, construction firms and federal and state agencies.

In 1959, he was awarded in Belgium, the honorary "Docteur Honoris Causa" degree. A winner of the Karl Terzaghi Award, he was also named to Sigma Xi. According to the citation that proclaimed him an Honorary Memer of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1977, Dr. Tschebotarioff "advanced the art of soil and foundation engineering through basic research and innovative practice, while fostering good will and mutual understanding among all people".

He was active in the National Society of Professional Engineers, the American Historical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Society. His many contributions to ASCE publications were climaxed by his presentation of the second Martin Kapp Memorial Lecture of the Metropolitan Section, given January 21, 1976. His talk .Half a Century of Soil Mechanics . Some Thoughts for the Future in Light of the Past. received a standing ovation. 150 engineers attending the presentation.

He is survived by his wife, Florence D. Tschebotarioff and a sister, Valentine Bill.

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//Autres liens relatifs au Professeur Tschebotarioff:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_P._Tschebotarioff
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http://voxlibris.claremont.edu/sc/collections/tschebotarioff.html
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http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~geoinst/Doc_pdf%20files/Tscheby_founding.pdf
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//Case Western Reserve University: Gregory P. Tschebotarioff
http://civil.case.edu/research/tschebotarioff/home
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//Diapos
http://ecivwww.case.edu/civil/Tschebotarioff/album/index.html
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//Diapos
http://ecivwww.case.edu/civil/Tschebotarioff/album/index_lb.html
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//Textes accompagnant les diapos
http://ecivwww.case.edu/civil/Tschebotarioff/Tscheboatarioff-Text.pdf
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