[1] In 1883, he was born the first child of Army Lieutenant-Colonel Anton von Terzaghi, of Italian origin, and Amalia Eberle in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic.

While fulfilling his military obligations, Terzaghi translated a popular English geology field manual into German and greatly expanded it.

For six months in Russia, he developed some novel graphical methods for the design of industrial tanks, which he submitted as a thesis for his PhD at the university.

Both his measurements and his analysis of the force on retaining walls were first published in English in 1919, and they were quickly recognized as an important new contribution to the scientific understanding of the fundamental behavior of soils.

He began studying experimental and quantitative aspects of the permeability of soils to water and produced theories to explain the observations.

In 1924 he published Erdbaumechanik auf Bodenphysikalischer Grundlage (The Mechanics of Earth Construction Based on Soil Physics) which would have a profound impact on the field.

He entered a new phase of prolific publication and a rapidly growing and lucrative involvement as an engineering consultant on many large-scale projects.

She claims the experience affected her for the rest of her life and that she "realized how narrow my world had been and that self-education could be and should be an exciting lifelong adventure.

"[7] From 1926 to 1932, Arthur Casagrande, another pioneer of soil mechanics and geotechnical engineering, worked as Terzaghi's private assistant at MIT.

A short consulting trip to the Soviet Union before taking up his post horrified him, and he came to oppose the communist system there, as a regime exemplified by its brutality and chaos.

He began his sabbatical with a short trip to consult with Todt and the architects of the proposed grandiose plans for immense buildings at the Nazi's Party Day Rally site in Nuremberg.

In Vienna, he returned to a nasty professional and political controversy (including an acrimonious dispute with Paul Fillunger), which he overcame only with some difficulty.

"[13] He escaped from Vienna frequently by extended consulting trips to major construction projects in England, Italy, France, Algeria, and Latvia, adding greatly to his engineering experience.

By the end of the war, he had consulted on the Chicago subway system, Newport News Shipways construction, and raising the Normandie, among others.

In 1950, he published work on the geological aspects of soft ground tunnelling including a classification system for the assessment of different soil types.

"[18] The Terzaghi and Peck Library, which is managed by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, in Oslo, Norway, holds an extensive collection of his papers.