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Geotechnical News • December 2018
COMMEMORATIVE EDITION
Note: The previous excerpt
appeared in the September 2017
issue of GN.
Robert (Bob) Peterson grew up on a
farm near Plato, Saskatchewan, then
completed high school inSaskatoon.
He enrolled in theengineering college
at the University of Saskatchewan in
1935, graduating with great distinction
in 1939, when he joined the PFRA
staff. Dean Mackenzie persuaded
Peterson to take the Harvard graduate
course in soil mechanics, which he
undertook in 1940-1941.
After graduating with a master’s
degree Peterson returned to the PFRA,
where be became Chief Soil Mechanics
and Materials Engineer. An agreement
was made between the PFRA and the
university to establish a laboratory
in the Engineering Building on the
Saskatoon campus. The lab was made
available to the students and Peterson
also lectured on soil mechanics.
PFRA’s first major dams, Pothole and
St.Mary, weredesigned byPeterson
and built in southern Alberta. St.Mary,
one of the largest earth dam projects
undertaken up to that time, was a
precedent-setting dam in Canada. The
technical concern was the strength
of a 200-foot-high embankment of
which the principal ingredient was
clay till. It was the first design based
on the application of soil mechanics
to the investigation of foundation and
construction soils, the first in which
quality control of water content and
compaction density was maintained
during construction, and the first in
which significant instrumentation was
placed to monitor the performance.
Charles Ripley, an Alberta and Har-
vard graduate, was Peterson’s resi-
dent engineer on theproject from the
summer of 1946 through 1948. Ripley
has pointed out that theinitial problem
faced by the early practitioners of soil
mechanics was to gain the confidence
of the civil engineers administrating
the project.According toRipley, Bob
Peterson possessed amarvelous ability
in precisely that capacity: “He got
along well with the district engineers,
and he made a great contribution in
demonstrating that there was a place
for soil mechanics in engineering of
dams.”
When the Travers Dam was con-
structed on Bearpaw Shale founda-
tion Peterson was the first person to
investigate the treacherous expansive
properties of this material. Peter-
son’s crowning achievement was the
successful completion in 1967 of the
Gardiner Dam on the South Saskatch-
ewan River, also built on the Bearpaw
Shale. Bob Peterson spent his entire
career with the PFRA. He also worked
as a specialist consultant on review
boards and became internationally
recognized as an authority on earth
dams. He died untimely in 1969 at the
age of 51.
Karl Terzaghi had laid the foundations
for a strong soil mechanics school
at MIT.Among his successors were
professors Glennon Gilboy, who joined
the faculty in 1926, and Donald W.
Taylor in 1932. Both of these men
died relatively young, but both left
a lasting impact on soil mechanics.
Taylor’s textbook,
Fundamentals of
Soil Mechanics,
published in 1948,
was an outgrowth of the lecture notes
prepared by Terzaghi andGilboy at
MITand became a standard textbook
in American soil mechanics schools.
In 1982 members of the Canadian Geotechnical Society conceived the idea of a book recording the development of
geotechnical engineering in Canada. Since a number of the early practitioners were still living at the time, foremost
among them Bob Hardy and Bob Legget, the approach was intended to create “a living history ... through the eyes and
recollections of living engineers, to show the humanity that underlies the development of major geotechnical projects in
Canada.”
As this book is now out-of-print, we will be publishing excerpts from it over the next few editions of Geotechnical News.
Ultimately, a pdf copy will be available.
Geotechnical Engineering in Canada
An Historical Overview
Cyril E. Leonoff
