Charles Francis Richter was an American seismologist and physicist.
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16 Facts About Charles Richter
2.
Charles Richter is most famous as the creator of the Charles Richter magnitude scale, which, until the development of the moment magnitude scale in 1979, quantified the size of earthquakes.
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3.
Charles Richter had German heritage: his great-grandfather was a Forty-Eighter, coming from Baden-Baden in 1848 in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states.
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4.
Charles Richter grew up with his maternal grandfather, who moved the family to Los Angeles in 1909.
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5.
Charles Richter went to work at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1927 after Robert Millikan offered him a position as a research assistant there, where he began a collaboration with Beno Gutenberg.
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6.
Charles Richter remained at the Carnegie Institution until 1936, when he obtained a post at the California Institute of Technology, where Beno Gutenberg worked.
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7.
Charles Richter became a full professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1952.
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9.
At the time when Charles Richter began a collaboration with Gutenberg, the only way to rate shocks was a scale developed in 1902 by the Italian priest and geologist Giuseppe Mercalli.
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10.
Charles Richter used a seismograph, an instrument generally consisting of a constantly unwinding roll of paper, anchored to a fixed place, and a pendulum or magnet suspended with a marking device above the roll, to record actual earth motion during an earthquake.
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11.
Charles Richter chose to use the term "magnitude" to describe an earthquake's strength because of his early interest in astronomy; stargazers use the word to describe the brightness of stars.
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12.
Charles Richter scale was published in 1935 and immediately became the standard measure of earthquake intensity.
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13.
Charles Richter did not seem concerned that Gutenberg's name was not included at first; but in later years, after Gutenberg was already dead, Charles Richter began to insist for his colleague to be recognized for expanding the scale to apply to earthquakes all over the globe, not just in southern California.
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14.
Charles Richter travelled to many nudist communities with his wife.
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15.
Charles Richter was initially shy about the song, thinking it demeaned science.
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16.
Charles Richter is buried in Altadena, California's Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum.
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