From the Archives: Charles Richter

In the 1930s, Charles Richter, in collaboration with fellow Caltech seismologist Beno Gutenberg, devised the Richter scale to measure earthquake intensity. As pointed out in Richter’s 1985, Los Angeles Times obituary:

… Richter, who was so involved in his life’s work that he kept a seismograph in his living room and welcomed and answered earthquake queries day or night, was a young research assistant in Caltech’s seismology laboratory in the early 1930s when he and the late Beno Gutenberg, then the director of the laboratory, worked out a way to grade the relative sizes of earthquakes.

Some sort of standard yardstick against which seismic shocks could be measured and compared had long been needed by the geological and seismological community. …

“The seismological laboratory was about to issue regular reports cataloguing the quakes we were finding monthly in Southern California,” Richter told The Times in an interview in 1980. “Because we were going to be tabulating between 200 and 300 quakes a year, we needed some means of grading them on a non-arbitrary basis.”...

This portrait, by Gil Cooper, appeared in the Oct. 25, 1964, Los Angeles Times. This image as part of a profile of the staff at the Caltech Reuben H. Donnelley Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena.

Richter passed away on Sep. 30, 1985. Read his Los Angeles Times obituary.

See more from the Los Angeles Times archives here