Donald Wood Taylor was an early contributor to the emerging field of soil mechanics, working at the Department of Civil and Sanitary Engineering at MIT, from the mid 1920’s until the end of his life in 1955. His textbook “Fundamentals of Soil Mechanics”, published in 1948, influenced a generation of geotechnical engineers.

In this book he presented the fundamentals of soil mechanics, aiming to familiarize the student with “those principles of mechanics which will improve his understanding of soil action, both in the qualitative sense and as it applies quantitatively to engineering problems.”