Earthquake Engineering, or when ∑F does not equal zero. 2 of 2
As you can see here from the US Geological Survey, and recall that the 1906 earthquake was a 7.8 on the Richter scale, the Winchester House roughly survived the energy of over 500 nuclear bombs if you account for it being in the orange zone instead of the red zone. As previously mentioned, natural gas was used to power the house along with coal and some geothermal so it would not have been surprising if there was a rupture, but there was not.
Engineers have recently been working on how to prevent windows from shaking, and therefore breaking, during an earthquake. This is called window drift. In Japan three years ago, researchers built a model house to work with the shaking instead of against it, but it had no wiring and was only made out of thin wood.
If a house could be designed 100 years ago to minimize impact, with vectors just being developed under Americans J. Willard Gibbs and Oliver Heaviside to account for 3-dimensional space and with slide rules, then surely it can be done now.
