Charles Richter

His mother taught him German, French and English at the same time, on a farm seven miles from Hamilton, Ohio, where he was born in 1900 and raised largely by his maternal grandfather. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1909, and school went badly. He was awkward, teased, and had no idea how to make friends. A preparatory school attached to the University of Southern California steadied him. He finished an AB in physics at Stanford at 20, then suffered a breakdown severe enough to require hospitalization, and spent three years as a museum messenger and a hardware warehouseman. Robert Millikan's lectures at the newly reorganized Caltech pulled him back. He took his doctorate there in 1928, on the hydrogen atom with a spinning electron.

He went to work in 1927 as a research assistant at the new Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena, funded by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, measuring seismograms and locating earthquakes. The scale he published in 1935 was built for one narrow job. It covered shallow local earthquakes in southern California, recorded on one particular instrument, the Wood-Anderson torsion seismometer, and he never claimed it was a universal measure of anything. It is logarithmic. Each whole number up is roughly ten times the ground motion and about 32 times the energy released.

The logarithmic basis was Beno Gutenberg's. Richter brought him the problem of numbers that spread across an impossible range, and Gutenberg told him to try plotting the data on a logarithmic scale. Gutenberg, whom Caltech hired away from Germany in 1930, then extended the method from southern California to the rest of the world. His name is not on the scale. He wanted nothing to do with reporters, and by the time anyone noticed, Perry Byerly of Berkeley had told the press the thing was Richter's and the phrase had set. Richter said little at first and spent his later years insisting it be called the Gutenberg-Richter scale. Gutenberg was dead by then. Writers since Susan Hough's 2007 biography have read Richter's social difficulty as autism, a diagnosis nobody ever gave him.

He installed a seismograph in his living room and draped the paper records over the backs of the chairs, answered press calls at any hour of the night, and when a quake struck during working hours took the laboratory telephone into his lap so nobody else could reach it. He and his wife Lillian were nudists. He collected pulp science fiction and kept notes on all 79 original Star Trek episodes. He also spent decades arguing for building codes and earthquake preparedness, and Los Angeles stripped cornices and ornaments off its buildings in the 1960s at his urging. Seismologists moved to moment magnitude around 1979. Reporters never did.

Charles Richter's life against the full span of the corpus.

• An Instrumental Earthquake Magnitude Scale discovery
  The founding paper, in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 1935
• Magnitude and Energy of Earthquakes discovery
  With Gutenberg, tying the scale to radiated energy 1936
• Seismicity of the Earth book
  With Gutenberg. Revised and expanded through the 1954 edition 1941
• The Gutenberg-Richter frequency relation discovery
  Drop one magnitude and roughly ten times as many earthquakes appear 1944
• Elementary Seismology book
  Built from his undergraduate lectures and often called his real contribution 1958

• April 26, 1900 aged 0 Born on the family farm outside Hamilton, Ohio His parents divorced before he was two. He took his mother's maiden name and never used another.
• 1920 aged ~20 Graduates from Stanford at 20, then breaks down A depressive episode severe enough to put him in hospital. Three years of warehouse and messenger work followed.
• 1927 aged ~27 Joins the Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena as a research assistant Millikan recommended him to Harry Wood. He had never studied earthquakes.
• 1928 aged ~28 Takes his Caltech doctorate and marries Lillian Brand The thesis was on the hydrogen atom with a spinning electron.
• 1932 aged ~32 Assigns the first magnitudes, to a group of January earthquakes Gutenberg had told him to try plotting the data logarithmically.
• March 10, 1933 aged 32 Feels the Long Beach earthquake while working late at Caltech It killed about 120 people and produced the Field Act, California's first earthquake building law.
• 1935 aged ~35 Publishes the magnitude scale He called it the magnitude scale. Perry Byerly told the press to call it Richter's.
• February 9, 1971 aged 70 The San Fernando earthquake hits and the city credits his warnings He had retired the year before and had not stopped working.
• September 30, 1985 aged 85 Dies of congestive heart failure in Pasadena Buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena.

• Albert A. Michelson 1852–1931
  The Michelson-Morley experiment and the measurement of the speed of light Caltech contemporary
• Marie Tharp 1920–2006
  Mapped the ocean floor by hand and found the Mid-Atlantic rift valley mapped the same forces
• Charles David Keeling 1928–2005
  Measured atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa from 1958 until his death, producing the Keeling Curve. kept a long instrumental record
• John Wesley Powell 1834–1902
  Geologist and explorer who led the first documented passage through the Grand Canyon. earlier American earth science