Seismology didn't start with the invention of the seismograph. Among its earlier successes was the idea of felt intensity and, since neither magnitudes nor recorded ground accelerations have given us satisfactory measures of the destructive powers of an earthquake, intensity scales have lingered on, treated with suspicion, abused, and a prey to curious revisions by belated successors to Adolfo Cancani.
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G. A. Eiby (1976) studied this question.
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