Timeline of the development of tectonophysics (before 1954) scheduled for mid 1912. So he hurried up to present his Continental Drift hypothesis. Mainly Charles Lyell, Harold Jeffreys, James D. Dana, Charles Schuchert, Chester Longwell, and the conflict with the Axis powers slowed down the acceptance of continental drifting . Timeline of the development of tectonophysics (before 1954) The evolution of tectonophysics is closely linked to the history of the continental drift and plate tectonics hypotheses. The continental drift/ Airy-Heiskanen isostasy hypothesis had many flaws and scarce data. The fixist/ Pratt-Hayford isostasy, the contracting Earth and the expanding Earth concepts had many flaws as well. The idea of continents
Continental drift Silurian – those of the Potsdam epoch. … and this will probably prove to the case in Primordial time with the other continents also". Dana was enormously influential in America – his "Manual of Mineralogy" is still in print in revised form – and the theory became known as "Permanence theory". This appeared to be confirmed by the exploration of the deep sea beds conducted by the Challenger expedition, 1872-6, which showed that contrary to expectation, land debris brought down by rivers to the ocean is deposited comparatively close to the shore on what is now known as the continental