CLEVELAND — Anytime the Earth moves, we’re reminded of good old Charles Richter and his scale.
So, who was this guy, who created the way we measure the intensity of earthquakes?
Here’s five things you may not know about Richter.
- Richter was a Buckeye, born in Hamilton near Cincinnati in 1900. After his parents divorced, his grandfather raised him in California. He lived until 1985.
- Richter didn’t invent the scale alone. He had a partner, Beno Gutenberg, who collaborated on the measuring formula while they were professors at the California Institute of Technology. Gutenberg’s name is lost to history, a fact that troubled Richter, but only later in life.
- Prior to the Richter scale, the world relied on the Mercalli scale developed in 1902 by Giuseppe Mercalli, an Italian priest and geologist. Mercalli used Roman numerals, naturally, and based the intensity of an earthquake on movement. A swinging chandelier would rate a I or II, for example. While something that destroyed a town would rate a X.
- Richter and his wife were “avowed naturists,” who liked to travel to nudist communities. We’ll leave that one alone as no further explanation is required.
- The Richter scale is not a device. It’s a mathematical formula. In fact, it’s no longer the dominant measuring tool for an earthquake. An earthquake is now reported by its magnitude, or the measure of the size of the earthquake’s source where the movement began.
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