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Charles Francis Richter was born in Ohio in 1900. After his mother divorced his father, she moved the family to Los Angles in 1909. Aprecocious student, Richter entered the University of Southern California at sixteen and transferred to Stanford University a year later, majoring in physics. He graduated in 1920 and finished a doctorate in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1928.

While Richter was a graduate student at Caltech, Noble laureate Robert A. Millikan lured him away from his original interest, astronomy, to become an assistant at the seismology laboratory. Richter realized that seismology was then a relatively new discipline and that he could help it mature. He stayed with it—and Caltech—for the rest of his university career, retiring as professor emeritus in 1970. In 1971 he opened a consulting firm—Lindvall, Richter and Associates—to assess the earthquake readiness of structures.

Richter published more than two hundred articles about earthquakes and earthquake engineering and two influential books, Elementary Seismology and Seismicity of the Earth (with Beno Gutenberg). These works, together with his teaching, trained a generation of earthquake researchers and gave them a basic tool, the Richter scale, to work with. He died in California in 1985.

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