Albert Atterberg

Albert Mauritz Atterberg (1846 to 1916) was a Swedish chemist and agricultural scientist whose work on soil gave engineers the Atterberg limits and Sweden its grain size scale. He took a doctorate in chemistry at Uppsala in 1872, lectured in analytical chemistry there until 1877 and then directed the Chemical Station and Seed Control Institute at Kalmar, where between 1891 and 1900 he published on the classification of oat and corn varieties. Near the age of fifty-four he turned to the plasticity and classification of soils, proposing the limit of 0.002 mm for clay particles and the consistency limits that bear his name. The International Society of Soil Science gave the work formal recognition in 1913, Karl Terzaghi carried it into geotechnical engineering and Arthur Casagrande standardized the tests in 1932. He was the uncle of the composer Kurt Atterberg.