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 the Seismo Lab at Caltech itself, which has spawned so many leaders of the discipline. Hough is a practising seismologist with the US Geological Survey, based on the Caltech campus, and so speaks with clarity and authority on these aspects. There are many revealing, enjoyable anecdotes and photographs about the people and circumstances of that time, which Hough has extracted from Richter's former colleagues and students, and preserved here. For that alone, it was worth writing this book. Of the magnitude scale itself, Hough gives a balanced and fair account. There have always been doubts about whether Richter really devised the scale on his own, whether Gutenberg's contribution was properly recognized, and whether Richter unfairly hogged the limelight. Hough's view, convincingly given, is that it was, essentially, Richter's conception, though it was later extended and modified by others. Though this was, undoubtedly, Richter's biggest contribution in the public's eyes, it probably isn't in those of professional seismologists. The original magnitude scale served its purpose at the time, but has since been superseded by other, more physically meaningful, measurements. Yet such is everyone's attachment to it, that the new scales have all had to dovetail with the rather restricted and artificial limitations of the original, so that its influence lives on. I would have liked to read more of the genesis and context of Richter's book Elementary Seismology, a truly splendid, inspirational work, which I read in my first term as a graduate student and which helped determine my own direction. Though published in 1958, a large chunk of the book is devoted to arguing that earthquakes are caused by movement on faults. That this was necessary sounds odd now, and Richter clearly had no doubt that it was true then, but it remained a respectable, though minority, opinion to question whether fault movement caused earthquakes until the mid 1960s, when the physics linking fault slip to seismic radiation was finally understood. This book, and Richter's collaboration with Gutenberg on the Seismicity of the Earth (1949), rank at least as highly as the magnitude scale in the estimation of many seismologists.
About half this book is concerned with Richter's personal life and character. He was clearly a difficult man, rarely at peace with himself (Hough keeps referring to his ‘demons’ without it being very clear what they were), a frustrated poet, a loner, and someone who easily took offence. His relations with colleagues were rarely smooth, though he did inspire a loyalty in many, at least among those who were young enough to survive him and be interviewed for this book. His relations with women, including his wife and sister, were also complicated and, in the end, remain ambiguous in spite of the archives. Indeed, the deliberate leaving of his personal papers for preservation, but without any clarification of some that clearly mattered to him and whose content was bound to provoke interest, leaving them open to possible misinterpretation and speculation, seems typical of the man. Hough portrays him as very sensitive to his own feelings, rather than those of others, somewhat dysfunctional and introspective, and speculates whether he would now be regarded as suffering from Asperger's syndrome. Perhaps; but maybe he was just difficult, private and rather antisocial. One of the most moving parts of the book is an appendix, recording a speech that Richter had prepared for his retirement party but in the end didn't give, because he took offence at the frivolous atmosphere of the occasion, whereas he was in a mood to be poetic and philosophical. He ends this speech with a statement of manifest good sense, that deserves to be aired again:
‘For years I fought a losing battle to keep away from involvement with the notion of earthquake prediction. The press and public will go toward the suggestion of prediction like hog to the trough. Meanwhile, other objects of investigation are neglected or distorted; and aid is given to the people who would like to forget the fact that for public safety we don't need prediction – that earthquake risk could be removed, almost completely, by proper building construction and regulation.’
Susan Hough clearly became attached to her subject while writing this book, and interprets Richter's numerous foibles and eccentricities with sympathy, understanding and sensitivity. It is a measure of her success that she persuades the reader that she is right and humane to do so. Richter was lucky to have such a biographer.
