More art than science, earthwork engineering relied heavily on local custom in 1904 when Karl Terzaghi earned an engineering degree in Austria. After supervising a dam project in Croatia and studying others in the U.S., he concluded that the study of soil mechanics had stagnated.
“The reason for this lack of progress lies mainly in the great difficulty of investigation of soil phenomena,” Terzaghi later wrote. He devoted the rest of his career to rigorously investigating the physical study of soils and soil behavior.