science · 30 September 1985 · 39 years ago
death
Died 30 Sep 1985 at age 85 (born 26 Apr 1900).
Charles Francis Richter was an American seismologist who devised the Richter Scale that measures earthquake magnitudes which he developed with his colleague, Beno Gutenberg, in the early 1930s. The scale assigns numerical ratings to the energy released by earthquakes. Richter used a seismograph to record actual earth motion during an earthquake. That is an instrument generally consisting of a constantly unwinding roll of paper, anchored to a fixed place, and a pendulum or magnet suspended with a marking device above the roll. The scale takes into account the instrument's distance from the epicenter. Gutenberg suggested that the scale be logarithmic so, for example, a quake of magnitude 7 would be ten times stronger than a 6. He wrote the article on Earthquakes for the 1974 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
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