{"id":206421,"date":"2025-04-26T07:58:54","date_gmt":"2025-04-26T07:58:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/americanstudies-april-26-27-2025-earthquakestudying-charles-richter\/"},"modified":"2025-04-26T07:58:54","modified_gmt":"2025-04-26T07:58:54","slug":"americanstudies-april-26-27-2025-earthquakestudying-charles-richter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=206421","title":{"rendered":"AmericanStudies: April 26-27, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: Charles Richter"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

[125 years
\nago<\/a> this weekend, the first name
\nin earthquakes<\/a>, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I\u2019ve AmericanStudied
\na handful of seismic quakes, leading up to this special birthday post on
\nRichter himself!]<\/p>\n

On what\u2019s
\nexpected in Richter\u2019s bio, what\u2019s a good bit less so, and what to make of the
\ncombo.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many of
\nthe details in Charles
\nRichter\u2019s<\/a> (1900-1985) biography read like you would expect for a famous
\nscientist overall and a prominent earthquake scientist in particular: grew up
\nin Southern California and attended Stanford as an undergrad and Cal Tech as a
\ngrad student; after a brief stint at the Carnegie Institute for Science in DC
\nreturned to California to work at the new Seismology Laboratory<\/a> in Pasadena
\nunder the renowned German-American seismologist Beno Gutenberg<\/a>; while
\ntogether there the pair
\nof them collaborated<\/a> in 1932 on a new standard scale to measure earthquakes
\n(with Richter apparently the lead developer, given that the scale was and
\nremains named after him specifically); and then a few years later, in 1937,
\nRichter returned
\nto Cal Tech<\/a> and taught and researched there for the rest of his career. Impressive
\nto be sure, but not a note different from what we might have drafted with only
\nthe knowledge that he was a seismologist who gave his name to a groundbreaking
\n(last time this week, I promise) scientific measurement.<\/span><\/p>\n

That might
\nstill be true of this more quirky detail from his Linda
\nHall Library bio<\/a> (authored by History Professor and Hall Library Consultant
\nWilliam
\nB. Ashworth Jr<\/a>.): \u201cin 1966, when he was 66, he saw his first Star Trek<\/i>
\nepisode and was hooked; he became an ardent Trekkie and kept careful notes on every
\none of the 79 original episodes of Star Trek<\/i> that aired between 1966 and
\n1969.\u201d Not exactly rocket science (sorry, sorry) to imagine that a scientist would
\nbe fascinated by this innovative and quite
\nscientific<\/a> (as such things go) sci fi show. But that same paragraph opens
\nthis way: \u201cSince the first full-scale
\nbiography<\/a> of Richter appeared a few years ago, Richter is now known for a
\nfew other things besides his scale. He and his wife Linda were ardent nudists in
\nthe 1930s and 40s, when nudist camps were a brand-new
\nAmerican phenomenon<\/a>. Richter also seems to have had a secret passion for
\nhis biological sister, Margaret.\u201d \u201cSo Richter was clearly not your typical seismologist,\u201d
\nthe paragraph concludes, in what I\u2019d have to call an understatement.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not
\nsharing those latter details in an attempt to be salacious, I promise (and
\nindeed, I\u2019d say going to nudist camps with your wife isn\u2019t particularly
\nsalacious; the sister detail is of course different, and I won\u2019t pretend to
\nknow anything more than what I\u2019ve shared). In part it\u2019s that I learned them
\nwhile researching this post, and I couldn\u2019t imagine not including them once I
\nhad done so. But I\u2019d say they and Richter\u2019s bio overall prompts an interesting
\nAmericanStudies kind of question: what are our rights and\/or our
\nresponsibilities when it comes to personal details for public figures,
\nparticularly those who have passed away? Neither the nudism nor the potential
\nincest have the slightest bit to do with why we know Richter\u2019s name; but if
\nknowing his name makes us want to learn about the man, then we\u2019re likely to
\nfind such details, or at least personal details that go far beyond whatever the
\npublic starting points might be. I\u2019m not going to come up with an answer to all
\nof this in my last couple lines here, but I\u2019ll just add this: public figures
\nare also complicated private humans, like every last one of us, and that\u2019s a
\nlesson well worth learning every chance we get. <\/span><\/p>\n

Next
\nseries starts Monday,<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben<\/span><\/p>\n

PS. What
\ndo you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you\u2019d analyze?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[125 years ago this weekend, the first name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I\u2019ve AmericanStudied a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to this special birthday post on Richter himself!] On what\u2019s expected in Richter\u2019s bio, what\u2019s a good bit less so, and what to make of the combo. Many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[13299,4759,4302,75808,19089],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-206421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history","tag-americanstudies","tag-april","tag-charles","tag-earthquakestudying","tag-richter"],"yoast_head":"\nAmericanStudies: April 26-27, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: Charles Richter - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=206421\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"AmericanStudies: April 26-27, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: Charles Richter - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[125 years ago this weekend, the first name in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. 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