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HOUGH, S. E. 2007. Richter’s Scale. Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man.

xiii + 337 pp. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Price £17.95, US $27.95 (hard covers). ISBN 9780 691 12807 8.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Charles Richter is, by a long way, the world’s best-known seismologist, perhaps the only household name the subject has ever produced, and all because of his earthquake magnitude scale. Indeed, it is quite common, especially outside the USA and Europe, to hear earthquakes spoken of without the word magnitude at all, as in: ‘it was size 6 Richter’. Charles Richter (1900–1985) spent his entire professional career at Caltech in Pasadena, and was a central figure in the heroic age of observational seismology, when new instruments and determined, systematic collection of earthquake-related phenomena added hugely to what was known about the Earth and the earthquakes it produced. His colleagues at Caltech included other giants, particularly Benioff, Gutenberg and Wood, all of whom he outlived. He left all his personal papers to the Caltech archives, which Susan Hough has researched thoroughly for this first serious biography of his personal and scientific life.

As a seismologist myself, I read with great fascination about Richter’s scientific career, his interaction with other luminaries of the day (Jeffreys, Byerlee, Macelwane) who helped shape the growing new subject, and of course of . . . [Full Text of this Article]