How Did Charles Richter Classify Earthquakes?

Charles Richter The ceiling lights sway back and forth like swings and pictures fall from their wall anchorings. An earthquake has just taken place. This meager earthquake has done little damage, but it could have caused great devastation. Classifying earthquakes was not an easy task, but thankfully, someone persevered long enough to develop a tool to do exactly that. Charles Richter, an expert seismologist, spent valuable hours creating a device which organizes earthquakes by their size. Charles Francis Richter was born on a farm in Hamilton, Ohio on April 26, 1900. His parents were divorced while he was young, so he grew up with his grandfather who moved the family to Los Angeles in 1909. While in Southern California, “Richter went to a preparatory school associated with the University of Southern California, where he spent his freshman year in college” (Encyclopedia of World Biography 1). He then transferred to Stanford

“Richter, who was studying earthquakes in California at the time, needed a simple way to precisely express what is qualitatively obvious: some earthquakes are small and others are large” (Scientific American 1). Previously, earthquakes had been measured by their damage to buildings and other structures. While developing the scale, “Richter's focus...was on the ground vibration itself, which he could easily monitor using seismometers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)” (Scientific American 1). Richter thought of stellar magnitude, or the luminosity of a star. Its magnitude isn’t its size or elements, its magnitude is the amount of light the star produces. “The magnitude of an earthquake is determined from the logarithm of the amplitude of waves recorded by seismographs” (Bellis 1). As with stellar magnitude, Richter desired to measure an earthquake based on the amount of vibration it generates. After several failed attempts, Richter and Gutenberg finally found a