Richter's Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man

Natural History, Feb, 2007 by Laurence A. Marschall

Richter's Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man by Susan Elizabeth Hough Princeton University Press; $27.95

For more than forty years, from 1927 until his formal retirement in 1970, Charlie Richter was an employee of the Seismological Laboratory, long a part of Caltech, in Pasadena, not far from his childhood home in Los Angeles. His work, for the most part, was routine: compiling and analyzing records from a network of earthquake detectors scattered around the area. Off-hours, he lived in a modest house with his wife and a few pets, enjoyed music, and belonged to a local book group. When time permitted, he would hike alone in the mountains. But apart from that, he shunned travel, seldom venturing out of the country--or out of the state, for that matter. Not the kind of life, one would imagine, to merit a 300-page biography.

Yet Charles Francis Richter was, and is, perhaps the most famous seismologist of our time, a man whose name is mentioned in news reports every time a large quake hits. The first thing an inquiring public wants to know is: How strong? The expected answer is one measured by Richter's scale of magnitudes, even though its scientific usefulness has largely been superseded by more modern standards.

The real Charles Richter, fellow seismologist Susan Hough would have us understand, was neither drudge nor genius, but a complex and gifted man who made fundamental contributions to his field. She is also at pains to recount her subject's highly unconventional personal life. Hough bases her profile on public documents; interviews with surviving family, colleagues, and acquaintances; and most of all, a wealth of personal papers. Richter, you see, left seemingly everything he ever wrote to the Caltech archives--perhaps in anticipation that one day a biographer would tackle the task of putting his life in order.

No one can quibble with Hough's assessment that the intensely private seismologist was a most unusual man. In appearance, he was the quintessential nerd--bespectacled, baby-face smile, and hair flying in all directions. True to stereotype, he kept detailed records of all the Star Trek episodes he watched. But Richter was much stranger than stereotype. For most of their lives he and his wife were active nudists, sunning themselves at various "naturist" camps around the Golden State. He was the author of several unpublished novels, as well as painfully self-referential poetry, some of it published--reams of verse, from which, thankfully, Hough quotes with restraint. Judging from some of his poems and letters, he may have carried on several extramarital affairs.

As a scientist, though, Richter earns Hough's admiration. According to his colleagues, he was a veritable encyclopedia of information about earthquakes, and a tireless advocate for improving building designs in quake-prone areas.

But Hough has a harder time coming to terms with Richter's quirky personality. She strongly suggests that Richter suffered from Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism, which could account for both his ability to concentrate on details and his difficulty in connecting with people. Of course, it's always dangerous to psychoanalyze from a distance. But the famous earthquake expert, she surmises, was a man equipped "with a three-hundred-horsepower engine and a transmission that slipped madly between gears," who followed his own peculiar highway through life's unsteady terrain.