Richter
NAME: Richter, Charles Francis.
ACHIEVEMENT(S): The Richter scale (earthquakes)
NICKNAME/ALIAS: Born Charles Francis Kinsinger.
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 26th April 1900, near Hamilton, OH.
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 30th September 1985, in Altadena, CA. Aged 85.
DISCIPLINE: Physicist and seismologist.
FIELD: Seismology.
LANGUAGE: English.
PARENTS: Frederick W. Kinsinger and Lillian Richter.
SIBLINGS: None.
SPOUSE: Lillian Brand, married 1928.
CHILDREN: None.
EDUCATION: Southern California Academy, 1912-14; Southern California University High School, 1914-16; University of Southern California, 1916-17;
University of Stanford, 1917-20; California Institute of Technology (Caltech), 1923-28.
MAJOR WORK: ‘Elementary Seismology', 1958.
LIFE AND TIMES: Richter decided to study at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena when the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Robert A. Millikan, took over as its new president in 1923. He studied for his Ph.D. in physics under Paul Epstein and graduated in 1928 with a dissertation on atomic theory.
In 1927, Millikan took Richter on as a research assistant in seismology at the newly Geophysical Laboratory in Pasadena, which was at that time run by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In 1930, Caltech hired Beno Gutenberg, a leading European seismologist, as director of the Pasadena Seismological Laboratory and, together with Gutenberg, Richter began working on a scale to measure the relative magnitude of earthquake tremors, a subject that was being researched around the world.
The method of rating shocks at that time was subjective, using a scale developed by the Italian priest and geologist, Giuseppe Mercalli, in 1902. The Mercalli scale classified earthquakes from 1 to 12, depending on how buildings and people responded to the tremor in various places.
A system relying on reaction by buildings and people couldn’t be considered reliable in sparsely populated areas, so scientists were trying to establish a standard method to measure and compare earthquakes. The Mercalli scale was seen to be unreliable because it measured earthquake intensity from distant seismic measuring stations, rather than at the epicentre of the shock, the location directly above the earthquake's origin.
Richter came up with the idea of creating a quantitative scale for the measurement of seismic events, which would allow scientists to make comparisons between shocks, regardless of the location of their epicentre. At Gutenberg's suggestion, he plotted data that had been recorded on Californian earth tremors over the previous three years, on a logarithmic scale.
In this case, a quake of magnitude 7 would be ten times stronger than a 6, a hundred times stronger than a 5, and a thousand times stronger than a 4, taking into account the instrument's distance from the epicentre.
Richter found that the data points of different quakes lined up in roughly parallel sets of curves, so he gave each event a numerical value based on its overall size, producing an absolute measurement of an earthquake's intensity, rather than the level at a given point.
He called this "the magnitude scale" and it was published as the standard measure of earthquake intensity in 1935. Soon after, it became known generally as the "Richter scale", even though he always tried to make people understand that the development had always been in partnership with Gutenberg.
Management of the Pasadena Seismological Laboratory became the responsibility of Caltech in 1937 and Richter was made assistant Professor in the Department of Geology. For many years, he and Gutenberg worked together to monitor seismic activity around the world and to classify the epicentres of all major earthquakes into geographical groups.
At the end of the 1930s, they applied their scale to quakes that originated more than 185 miles below the ground and measured 8 or more on the Richter scale. In 1941, they published 'Seismicity of the Earth', a textbook which, in its revised edition, was a comprehensive survey of geophysical research on earthquake activity around the world.
This work soon became a standard reference book in the seismic field.
In 1947, Richter was promoted to Associate Professor at Caltech then, in 1952, he was made a full Professor. His greatest scientific work, 'Elementary Seismology', was published in 1958 and contained descriptions of major historical earthquakes, along with tables and charts. It also included subjects derived from his lectures at Caltech, ranging from the nature of earthquake motion to earthquake insurance and building construction.
Apart from a year as Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Tokyo, from 1959 to 1960, Richter spent his entire career at Caltech, devoting all of his efforts to seismology. In the 1960s, he installed a seismograph in his living room so that he could monitor quakes at any time and he learned Russian, Italian, French, Spanish, German and a little Japanese, so that he could read scientific papers in their original languages.
He retired in 1970 but, a year later, set up a consultancy offering seismic evaluations of buildings.
ASSESSMENT: Richter helped to transform seismology from a qualitative survey of earthquake damage, into a study focused on the forces that cause seismic events.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: His work related to that of <work related to> Mallet* and <work related to> Boris Golitsyn*.
ONELINER: CF Richter, of Richter earthquake scale
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Witze, Alexandra, “Charles F. Richter" in Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists, ed. Emily J. McMurray, New York & London, Gale Research Inc., 1995.