Genealogies and Critiques of Resilience

The concept of resilience has a long history. Scientists first used the Latin verb resilire (“to jump back” or “to recoil”) to account for materials that demonstrated qualities of persistence, endurance, and robustness. In the seventeenth century, natural philosopher Francis Bacon used the word to describe the bouncing movement of sound waves as they hit a wall. But the term made its most common and, by now, most familiar appearance during the Industrial Revolution. Then, engineers and physicists used the idea of resilience to capture the capacity of some materials to regain their original properties after an exposure to extreme stress. This basic usage continued into the early twentieth century, when engineers, chemists, and physicists began developing a method of measuring the resilience of materials subjected to extreme temperatures and pressures. The result was the 1901 Charpy Impact Test, “a standardized high-strain-rate test that provides a measure of a material’s notch robustness.”1 Subsequently, endurance tests and machines developed rapidly, especially during the enormous industrial push of World War II.

Genealogy · Resilience (materials science) · Sociology · History · Regional resilience and development