About Charles Richter
Charles Francis Richter was an American seismologist and physicist. He is the namesake and one of the creators of the Richter scale, which, until the development of the moment magnitude scale in 1979, was widely used to quantify the size of earthquakes. Inspired by Kiyoo Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, Richter first used the scale in 1935 after developing it in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg; both worked at the California Institute of Technology. A shock that set chandeliers swinging might rate as a I or II on this scale, while one that destroyed huge buildings and created panic in a crowded city might count as an X. Richter became a full professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1952.
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