| American seismologist in Hamilton, Ohio, Richter was educated
at the University of Southern California, Stanford, and the
California Institute of Technology, where he obtained his PhD in
1928. He worked for the Carnegie Institute (1927-36) before
being appointed to the staff of the California Institute of
Technology. He became professor of seismology there in 1952.
developed his scale to measure the strength of earthquakes in
1935. Earlier scales had been developed by de Rossi in the 1880s
and by Giuseppe Mercalli in 1902 but both used a descriptive
scale defined in terms of damage to buildings and the behavior
and response of the population. This restricted their use to the
measurement of earthquakes in populated areas and made the
scales relative to the type of building techniques and materials
used. scale is an absolute one, based on the amplitude of the
waves produced by the earthquake. He defined the magnitude of an
earthquake as the logarithm to the base 10 of the maximum
amplitude of the waves, measu