Charles Richter

American physicist and seismologist

• Born: April 26, 1900
• Birthplace: Near Hamilton, Ohio
• Died: September 30, 1985
• Place of death: Pasadena, California

Richter, best remembered for developing the scale that measures the magnitude of earthquakes, also was a poet and a distinguished teacher who inspired many of his students to study physics and seismology.

Early Life

Charles Richter (RIHK-tur) was born Charles Francis Kinsinger near Hamilton, Ohio, to an unstable and dysfunctional family. His father, Frederick William Kinsinger, a farmer, and his mother, Lillian Anna Richter, a school teacher, were married on July 15, 1891, in Butler County, Ohio, but divorced shortly after the birth of their first child, Margaret, in 1892. According to Lillian, they remarried before Richter’s birth in 1900. The family had been living on a farm in Overpeck, north of Cincinnati. Unfortunately, his parents’ second marriage did not last. His mother left Kinsinger again and moved to her parents’ house. She resumed the use of her family name for herself and her children. In 1907, after the death of his wife, Lillian’s father moved to the Wilshire district of Los Angeles, where the young Charles Richter grew up.

Although educated at home in Ohio, the Richter children were sent to public school in Los Angeles. However, the intellectual horizons that opened for them were clouded by continuing difficulties at home. Richter had survived cholera when he was fifteen months old, but the disease had left him small and thin. His sister Margaret was extremely assertive, perhaps because the combination of her brother’s frailty and her mother’s extreme emotional attachment to her own father created a void in the family’s authority structure that needed to be filled. Though Richter found her to be bossy, the self-assertive drive that she developed served her well; she later earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University, a rare accomplishment for a young woman at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Richter’s childhood was a lonely and difficult one, but he found some solace in his studies, particularly in astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and physics. After graduating from high school in 1916, he went to Stanford University and obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics in 1920 and his Ph.D. in 1927. His intellectual accomplishments, however, did not end the emotional turmoil of his upbringing. He was depressed, suffered a nervous breakdown, and had to spend a year (1920-1921) in a private sanitarium (mental health clinic) under the care of a psychiatrist. His psychiatrist suggested that Richter write as a way to channel his emotions, beginning his lifelong passion for poetry.

After returning to Stanford to work on his Ph.D., Richter met Lillian Brand in 1927, a divorcée with a two-year-old son. After Richter’s graduation and full-time employment, they married on July 19, 1928. Even this happy event was marred by discord; Richter took his new wife and son to live with his mother and sister, which led to conflicts among the women. After some hesitation, Richter moved his family to their own house.

Life’s Work

At the end of 1927, while working on his dissertation, Richter became a part-time research assistant at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena. Under the direction of Robert Andrews Millikan , the laboratory introduced Richter to what would become his lifelong passion and career. As soon as he received his Ph.D. he was hired as a full-time researcher and faculty member, positions he held at Caltech until he retired in 1970.

The location of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory was ideal. It was relatively close to the notorious San Andreas fault, which produced many earthquakes for study. With a capable and highly creative staff, including Millikan, Harry Wood (an astronomer), Hugo Benioff (a former astronomer and newly appointed seismologist), and Carl Anderson, the laboratory flourished. Richter had found a perfect intellectual home.

After Wood and Anderson created a new and precise seismometer to record the basic data necessary to create a catalog of earthquakes, staff developed a network of seismic stations equipped with the new devices. Other research institutions, such as the Seismology Institute of the University of California, Berkeley, the Lick Observatory of San Jose, and St. Louis University, followed suit, vastly improving and expanding the body of empirical data collected about earthquakes.

As seismology gained a greater reputation for scientific accuracy and application, the Caltech lab was able to attract well-known geophysicists. Among these new scientists was Beno Gutenberg , a Jewish German seismologist who fled Germany because of the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, who would have a significant role in Richter’s well-known research.

In 1931, Caltech had been working on a catalog of all earthquakes detected by its seismographs in the preceding three years. The catalog listed several hundred earthquakes, most of which had not been felt by humans, only detected by instruments. Richter became concerned about possible misinterpretations of the listings. With no indication of the strength of the earthquakes, he believed that the public might overestimate the risk of earthquakes in areas where seismographs were numerous and underestimate the risk in areas where seismographs were few. Richter began working on the problem of developing an easy-to-understand, more accurate scale.

In January, 1935, in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, Richter formally published a description of what came to be known as the Richter scale, which measures the energy, or magnitude, released by earthquakes. Richter, along with Gutenberg, had studied the nature of seismic waves and how they reflect and refract as they move through the earth’s interior. Their work provided the theoretical basis for the development of the scale. (Many believe that the scale should be known as the Gutenberg-Richter scale. Richter himself commented in an interview in 1979 that the name that has become common “somewhat underrates Gutenberg’s part in developing it for further use.”) Richter and Gutenberg published their combined contributions in the book Seismicity of Earth (1949), which remains a highly regarded work in the field.

Issues of just equitable recognition aside, the scale was a major breakthrough in the recording and comparison of seismic events. Though the scale is logarithmic and has no upper limit, no earthquake greater than 9.5 has ever been recorded. Richter continued to work in the field of seismology even after his retirement from Caltech in 1970. His health declined after the death of his wife in 1972, and he died of congestive heart failure on September 30, 1985.

Significance

Richter was an unconventional scientist. He was schooled and employed in a highly precise intellectual discipline but also was a poet and even a practicing nudist. A pioneer in the science of seismology, his achievements are even more remarkable when one considers that plate tectonics, which explains the motion of the earth’s surface, had not been discovered at the time his earliest papers on quake magnitude were published. Richter’s legacy not only encompasses his magnitude scale but also the earthquake monitoring system, his long-term catalogs, his encyclopedic knowledge (he was, according to many, a “walking encyclopedia”), and even his poetry, which he published throughout his life.

Bibliography

Bolt, Bruce A. Earthquakes. 5th ed. San Francisco, Calif.: W. H. Freeman, 2003. Presents a generally nontechnical account of earthquakes, their effects, and methods of studying them. Includes a good description of magnitude and intensity.

Hough, Susan Elizabeth. Earthshaking Science: What We Know (and Don’t Know) About Earthquakes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. Explores earthquake science in a manner geared to general readers. Includes discussion of earthquake measurement and the Richter scale.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Richter’s Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. This book is based on the detailed study of personal journals, papers, and family information. Paints a complex biographical portrait of the famous geoscientist.

Zannos, Susan. Charles Richter and the Story of the Richter Scale. Bear, Del.: Mitchell Lane, 2003. Provides a simple but thorough overview of Richter’s work. Part of the Unlocking the Secrets of Science series. A good introductory source.