RICHTER, CHARLES FRANCIS

born , April 26, 1900, near Hamilton, Ohio, U.S. died Sept. 30, 1985, Pasadena, Calif. American physicist and seismologist who helped develop the Richter scale (q.v.) for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes. Born on an Ohio farm, Richter and his mother moved to Los Angeles in 1916. He attended the University of Southern California (191617) and then studied physics at Stanford University (A.B., 1920) and the California Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1928). Richter was on the staff of the Seismological Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pasadena, Calif. (192736), and then both taught physics and seismology at the California Institute of Technology (193770) and worked at its Seismological Laboratory (founded in 1936). With Beno Gutenberg (18891960), a German-born Caltech professor, he developed in 1935 the scale that came to be associated with his name, replacing an older Mercalli scale, which unreliably measured an earthquake's intensity at the seismic measuring station rather than at the epicentre of the earthquake. Richter also mapped out quake-prone areas in the United States but tended to disparage attempts at earthquake prediction. He wrote (with Beno Gutenberg) Seismicity of the Earth and Associated Phenomena (1949; rev. ed. 1954) and Elementary Seismology (1958).