Charles F. Richter Dies; Earthquake Scale Pioneer

Charles F. Richter, whose name is known worldwide for the earthquake scale he helped to develop but whose private self was as complex and hidden as an unmapped seismic fault, died Monday afternoon in Pasadena.

His longtime friend, Jerene Hewitt, said he died at Park Marino Convalescent Center and had been suffering from congestive heart disease for several years. He was 85.

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.

Two scientists--Michele de Rossi, an Italian, and Francoise-Alphonse Forel, a Swiss--had devised a 10-point scale in the 1880s to indicate the varying intensities of tremors. Their basic system was refined, in 1902, into a 12-point scale by Italian priest-geologist Giuseppe Mercalli.

Both the Rossi-Forel and Mercalli scales were based on the intensity of a shock as perceived by people and as reflected in the damage done to structures. A tremor that was felt by only a few people and that set delicately suspended objects swinging, for example, registered 1 or 2 on these scales, whereas a shock that caused general panic in a heavily populated area, knocked down buildings and bent railroad tracks would count as 10.

The trouble with these scales was their subjectivity--a tremor that generates widespread fright in, say, Miami, might barely raise eyebrows in Tokyo--and their dependency on human and structural responses. And how did one rate earthquakes that occur, as many do, far from inhabited areas?

These shortcomings prompted a number of scientists around the world to seek, in the early 1930s, a better way of quantifying the size of earthquakes. As has often happened in the history of science, several individuals--working independently and unaware of each other’s efforts--began nibbling at the edges of common solutions.

Rudimentary System

At about the same time that Richter and Gutenberg were analyzing the patterns of waves produced by seismic shocks, Kiyoo Wadati in Japan was calculating how the amplitude (the height of a wave crest) of a seismic wave decays with increasing distance from the source of the tremor. Their approaches were similar, but Richter and Gutenberg carried their idea through to a complete, if rudimentary, system.

There was some urgency to the Caltech work.

“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.”

Richter’s initial objectives were as modest as they were geographically limited. Using the measurements taken by a network of seven seismometers scattered around Southern California, he hoped to sort out the region’s earthquakes into just three broad categories: small, medium and large.

He succeeded far beyond his expectations. As he began plotting on graph paper the peak amplitudes of waves coming from different earthquakes as a function of their distances from the seismometers, he found, as Wadati had, that they decay along a gently curving line.

Logarithmic Scale

Richter also noticed that the lines of different earthquakes stacked themselves on top of each other in a chevron pattern, rather like a sergeant’s stripes. On the bottom of the stack were the smaller tremors; at the top, the larger.

Richter and Gutenberg then worked out a logarithmic scale, based on the tracings of one particular earthquake chosen as their “standard.” Now the sizes of these neatly stacked earthquakes could be read off the lined graph paper with specific numerical values, accurate to one-tenth of the basic value they arbitrarily assigned as “1.”

(Because it is a log scale, each whole number increase means a tenfold jump in the size of the earthquake. Thus a magnitude 4 earthquake is 10 times greater than a 3, a 5 is 100 times greater than a 3, and a 6 is 1,000 times greater than a 3.

Last month’s devastating Mexico quake registered 8.1.

Richter, drawing on his earlier training in physics and his interest in astronomy, selected the word “magnitude” to define these calculated numerical values, just as astronomers have used the term to distinguish stars of varying relative brightness.

Richter and Gutenberg first developed a scale for Southern California alone, but they quickly modified and expanded it to apply to earthquakes everywhere. In a telephone interview early in 1981, Richter credited Gutenberg for seeing that the scale could be extended to global events.

Stressed Colleague’s Role

In his later years, Richter seemed concerned that Gutenberg, who died in 1960, receive his proper recognition for the work.

“The usual designation of the magnitude scale by my name, though perhaps convenient,” he said in a 1977 speech, “does less than justice to the great part which Dr. Gutenberg played in extending the scale beyond its initially local range.”

“There is simply no question that it should be known as the Gutenberg-Richter Scale,” said one longtime Caltech colleague of both men, “but for many, many years, Charlie did very little to emphasize Beno’s role. If you wanted to think it had all been Richter’s doing, that was OK with Charlie.”

Indeed, members of Gutenberg’s family were openly displeased by what they saw as Richter’s acceptance of the public impression that the scale was his alone.

Richter was born April 26, 1900, on a farm near Hamilton, Ohio. When he was 9 he and his family moved to Los Angeles, and he experienced his first tremor a year later, in 1910. “It surprised me no end,” he recalled years later.

Studied at Stanford

After attending local schools, Richter entered USC in 1916 but transferred at the end of his freshman year to Stanford University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics there in 1920 and enrolled at Caltech for graduate study.

A year before winning his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1928, he began working in the seismology laboratory when Robert A. Millikan, then the university’s president, offered him a post there.

“It was supposed to be temporary,” he said once, “but it was very far from temporary.” With the exception of the year 1959-60, when he was in Japan as a Fulbright scholar, Richter spent his entire career at Caltech. He became an assistant professor of seismology in 1937, an associate professor in 1947, a full professor in 1952 and a professor emeritus in 1970.

“He loved earthquakes,” said Don L. Anderson, the present director of Caltech’s seismological laboratory, “and he was a walking encyclopedia of seismic data.”

His interest in earthquakes never seemed to diminish, even in his later years. “When we had a good earthquake,” Anderson recalled, “Charlie would be around that afternoon or the next day, asking all kinds of questions about it.” After he retired, Caltech provided Richter with an office--which he seldom used--until illness sent him to the convalescent home.

Wrote Two Books

Richter’s real office was his own mind and not an enclosed space in some building. He wrote two books, “Elementary Seismology” and, with Gutenberg, “Seismicity of the Earth,” but he authored very few technical papers of the sort that appear in professional journals.

“He spent most of his time analyzing seismic records,” Anderson said, “and while that didn’t appear in papers, it did result in the Caltech catalogue of California earthquakes, one of the most complete and most accurate compilations of its kind.”

“He had a remarkable mind,” said Robert P. Sharp, a Caltech professor emeritus of geology and an old friend of Richter, “and he could synthesize a great deal of information. His memory was extraordinary.”

Possessing these qualities, Richter was more inclined to what scientists called “Gedank”--or thought--experiments, rather than tinkering with equipment in a laboratory. “He certainly was no experimentalist,” Sharp recalled, “but he could look at a seismogram, size it up right away and see just where it fitted into some larger seismic picture.”

Had Home Seismograph

Richter was so consumed by earthquake studies that he had the seismograph, a recording instrument, installed in the living room of his small Altadena house in the 1960s.

He didn’t mind at all if reporters awakened him in the middle of the night, as long as they were calling about a tremor that had just shaken some part of Southern California. He would pad over to the recorder, check for the telltale squiggles of a shock and then patiently answer the reporter’s questions.

“That was one of his joys and pleasures,” said Francis Lehner, who worked with Richter for many years at Caltech, “talking to the press about earthquakes.”

Others, however, believed that Richter’s pleasure was actually a mania. When the seismological laboratory was located in an old Pasadena mansion years ago, Richter would place the lab’s telephone in his lap right after a tremor had been felt in the region, so that only he could answer the flood of calls.

Even his non-admirers admired the way that Richter would extract useful information about an earthquake from any source. Example:

“Was that an earthquake we just felt?” an anxious caller to the laboratory would ask in the days before Caltech’s network of instruments was as extensive as it is today.

“Where are you calling from?” Richter would reply, his pencil hovering above a map of the Southland. If enough people called in from many different places, Richter thus would be able to make a rough estimate of both the temblor’s epicenter and its magnitude.

Lehner said that Richter had a marvelous sense of humor, once he warmed to a subject, and he frequently convulsed audiences at his lectures with a series of wry comments.

“He could also be explosive,” Lehner recalled, “and really blow up over something. But whenever he lost his temper like that, he’d feel really bad afterward and try to make it up with you.”

Had His Quirks

Richter had a number of idiosyncrasies. For most of his adult life, he and his wife, Lillian, whom he married in 1928, were nudists--an activity regarded with indifference today but which had image-conscious Caltech officials decidedly nervous.

“He had a brilliant mind,” said one former colleague, “but it bordered on instability in his younger years.” Richter sought psychiatric help in the 1920s, something of a daring thing to do then, and it was his psychiatrist who introduced Richter to his future wife.

The Richters’ marriage was a strange union, but by all accounts a satisfying one to both parties.

“They each got what they wanted from the marriage,” said a woman who knew both Richters. “Lillian got a feeling of security, of belonging, of having someone to look up to, and Charlie got someone who worshiped him. I must tell you: He was very proud of her and her writing.” Lillian Richter had taught creative writing at a local college and did some writing herself. She died in 1972.

Separate Christmases

For reasons that neither ever divulged to anyone, the Richters always spent Christmases apart. She would travel to some far-off place--one year it was Timbuktu in Africa, just because she had become obsessed with the name of that city in Mali--and he would indulge his own particular pleasure: long, solitary hikes in the mountains. The couple also took separate summer vacations.

There was always an air of tension about Richter, and although he could be charming and gracious upon occasion, he found socializing difficult. “We had dinner at their house a couple of times,” said a former Caltech colleague, “but they were terribly awkward evenings.”

Every year, the students and faculty of Caltech’s seismological laboratory get together for a year-end party. They drink beer, eat and put on little skits that poke fun at each other. “Charlie came to a few of these parties,” said one professor, “before he finally came up to me and said: ‘Frankly, I can’t take this sort of thing.’ He never attended another.”

Another longtime Caltech associate described Richter as “high strung” and remembered that he had pronounced facial tics. He could also be testy, but at the same time he was shy and easily wounded.

At his retirement party in 1970, colleagues and students sang a little ditty entitled “The Richter Scale” that Caltech Prof. J. Kent Clark had written for a university revue. Like a lot of Clark’s songs, it was clever and caught both faculty members’ and students’ fancy:

It measured 1, 2 on the Richter Scale,

A shabby little shiver;

1, 2 on the Richter Scale--

A queasy little quiver . . . .

Richter became furious as the songsters worked their way up to higher magnitudes. Weeks later, as his old friend Sharp sought to placate him, Richter told his colleague why he had been so offended by the song: “MY science,” he said, “is NOT a joke.”

Although he took his first few years of retirement uneasily, Richter eventually began to mellow, and people on the Caltech campus found him simpler to deal with for the first time in decades.

In 1971 Richter helped start a consulting firm in Glendale that offered seismic evaluations on structures, and his mind remained alert and vigorous until last year. He sometimes attended seismology seminars on the Caltech campus, and although he might doze sporadically, he obviously grasped all the material being presented. His questions would be incisive and pertinent.

Richter, who was childless, was somewhat skeptical about the emerging field of earthquake prediction, preferring instead to see more attention paid to the large number of structurally dangerous buildings that still stand all over Southern California.

“He was very compassionate about the people living in those buildings,” Sharp said, “and he had a strong sense of community with people. He just had trouble expressing those feelings.”