20 Facts About Thomas Jaggar

Thomas Jaggar founded the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and directed it from 1912 to 1940.

Thomas Jaggar became head of the department of geology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1906.

Thomas Jaggar became the first director of HVO in 1912, and remained at HVO until 1940, when he retired and became a research associate in geophysics at the University of Hawaii.

Thomas Jaggar married twice in his life, and had two children.

Thomas Jaggar's father was the first Bishop of Southern Ohio.

Thomas Jaggar graduated with a baccalaureate degree in 1893 and a master's degree in 1894, both in geology and both from Harvard University.

Thomas Jaggar was named an associate professor of geology at Harvard in 1903, and, during summers, worked for the United States Geological Survey.

Thomas Jaggar felt strongly that experimentation was the key to understanding earth science.

Thomas Jaggar constructed water flumes bedded by sand and gravel to understand stream erosion and melted rocks in furnaces to study the behavior of magmas.

The next 10 years of Thomas Jaggar's life brought expeditions to the scenes of great earthquakes and eruptions in Italy, the Aleutians, Central America, and Japan.

Thomas Jaggar traveled to Hawaii in 1909 at his own expense, and determined that Kilauea was to be the home of the first American volcano observatory.

Thomas Jaggar married co-worker Isabel Peyran Maydwell, a widowed schoolteacher from California, in 1917.

Thomas Jaggar died in Honolulu on January 17,1953, at age 81.

In July 1909, Thomas Jaggar received funding of $25,000 from the Whitney Estate through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for use in construction of the HVO; funding came the HVRA and the people of Hilo.

In spring of that year, Thomas Jaggar left MIT to become the first director of the HVO.

In 1919, Thomas Jaggar convinced the National Weather Service to provide funding for the HVO.

The USGS established a Section of Volcanology in 1926, with Thomas Jaggar named as its first chief.

On February 3,1923, when an 8.4-magnitude earthquake hit the southeastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Thomas Jaggar tried to warn the Hilo harbormaster about the possibility that a tsunami could have been generated.

Thomas Jaggar's warning was not taken seriously and one fisherman was killed when the tsunami hit, with damage estimated at $1.5 million.

Thomas Jaggar's hope was that the lava tubes or channels could be destroyed, thereby robbing the advancing flow while feeding another flow that would re-cover the same area.