AmericanStudies: April 26-27, 2025: EarthquakeStudying: Charles Richter

[125 years
ago this weekend, the first name
in earthquakes, Charles Richter, was born. So in his honor I’ve AmericanStudied
a handful of seismic quakes, leading up to this special birthday post on
Richter himself!]

On what’s
expected in Richter’s bio, what’s a good bit less so, and what to make of the
combo.

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

That might
still be true of this more quirky detail from his Linda
Hall Library bio (authored by History Professor and Hall Library Consultant
William
B. Ashworth Jr.): “in 1966, when he was 66, he saw his first Star Trek
episode and was hooked; he became an ardent Trekkie and kept careful notes on every
one of the 79 original episodes of Star Trek that aired between 1966 and
1969.” Not exactly rocket science (sorry, sorry) to imagine that a scientist would
be fascinated by this innovative and quite
scientific (as such things go) sci fi show. But that same paragraph opens
this way: “Since the first full-scale
biography of Richter appeared a few years ago, Richter is now known for a
few other things besides his scale. He and his wife Linda were ardent nudists in
the 1930s and 40s, when nudist camps were a brand-new
American phenomenon. Richter also seems to have had a secret passion for
his biological sister, Margaret.” “So Richter was clearly not your typical seismologist,”
the paragraph concludes, in what I’d have to call an understatement.

I’m not
sharing those latter details in an attempt to be salacious, I promise (and
indeed, I’d say going to nudist camps with your wife isn’t particularly
salacious; the sister detail is of course different, and I won’t pretend to
know anything more than what I’ve shared). In part it’s that I learned them
while researching this post, and I couldn’t imagine not including them once I
had done so. But I’d say they and Richter’s bio overall prompts an interesting
AmericanStudies kind of question: what are our rights and/or our
responsibilities when it comes to personal details for public figures,
particularly those who have passed away? Neither the nudism nor the potential
incest have the slightest bit to do with why we know Richter’s name; but if
knowing his name makes us want to learn about the man, then we’re likely to
find such details, or at least personal details that go far beyond whatever the
public starting points might be. I’m not going to come up with an answer to all
of this in my last couple lines here, but I’ll just add this: public figures
are also complicated private humans, like every last one of us, and that’s a
lesson well worth learning every chance we get.

Next
series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What
do you think? Famous quakes or other natural disasters you’d analyze?