Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,853

This is the grave of Charles Richter.

Born in 1900 in Overpeck, Ohio, Richter mostly grew up in Los Angeles after his mom moved there in 1909. His father left the family when he was an infant. He was a very smart kid and ended up at Stanford. He graduated from there in 1920 and started a PhD at Cal Tech. But before he finished the dissertation, he was offered a position at the Carnegie Institution in Washington. It was common at this time for college professors to not have PhDs, though this might limit their advance to the most elite schools. Richter took the job. He was a research assistant there primarily.

Around the time Richter took that job, in 1927, he became interested in earthquakes. Well, you know where this is going. He invented the Richter scale to measure the power of earthquakes. That happened in collaboration with the Seismology Lab at Cal Tech. It wanted to start publishing scientific reports around earthquakes. But it did not have a way to measure them. Working with Beno Gutenberg, Richter created it and of course we still use it today. Richter’s early scientific interest was astronomy and the Richter scale came out of that, for astronomers use magnitude to measure stars. So the principle was applicable (and to be fair to myself here, I am no science writer or understander, so correct any mistakes!). The seismograph they invented is exactly what you imagine today–the giant roll of paper with the pen that shows the squiggly line when an earthquake hits that uses weights to measure the shaking of the earth.

Now, if you are like me, you are wondering, why did Richter hog all the credit for what soon became the universally adopted way to measure earthquakes? Where is Gutenberg? The answer is simple–Gutenberg hated publicity and so he didn’t want his name on anything. Richter could go to the conferences and give the talks and do all the publicity. He would just research.

Richter moved back to Cal Tech in 1936. Gutenberg was already there. They published Seismicity of the Earth in 1941, which remains a classic of the field today. Richter was almost entirely uninterested in publications in academic journals. He didn’t see the point and thought his public work was far more important, a career path that I tend to agree with. Later in his career, he did a lot of work in Japan, a nation that you can imagine had plenty of interest in Richter and which Richter would also show interest. He also started working on building codes to resist earthquakes. Makes sense and what is a better public use of scholarship than that? In fact, Richter launched a campaign for LA to get rid of fancy ornamental things on buildings that could easily fall during an earthquakes.

In his personal life, Richter was a committed nudist. OK then.

Richter died in 1985, of heart failure. He was 85 years old.

I’d like to thank Richter for his scale, since I was in my first ever significant earthquake a couple of weeks ago, down in Mexico. 5.6. Big enough! Let’s not be in anything larger than that!!

Charles Richter is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, California.

If you would like this series to visit other seismologists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Bruce Bolt is in Oakland, California and Adam Dziewonski is in Harvard, Massachusetts, which for the record is not actually that close to Harvard University. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.