Complex sentence: Following the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, California, Wood expanded his background of geology and mineralogy and progressed into seismology and in the 1920s co-developed the torsion seismometer, a device tuned to detect short-period seismic waves that are associated with local earthquakes.
Split into simpler sentences: Following the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, California, Wood expanded his background of geology and mineralogy and his career took a change of direction into the field seismology. In the 1920s co-developed the torsion seismometer, a device tuned to detect short-period seismic waves that are associated with local earthquakes.