Charles Francis Richter in southern California. Since 1935, several other magnitude scales have been developed. Richter was an active and avowed naturist. He travelled to many nudist communities with his wife. At his retirement party, a group of colleagues at Caltech, called the "Quidnuncs," played and sang a ditty titled "Richter Scale," which gave examples of earthquakes in American history, told in ballad style. Richter was not amused, however; he was furious. The author of the song, Kent Clark, stated in a 1989 interview that Richter enjoyed the song. The song is played on the Dr. Demento show occasionally. Richter died of congestive
Richter magnitude scale distance of the station, formula_23. In practice, readings from all observing stations are averaged after adjustment with station-specific corrections to obtain the formula_2 value. Because of the logarithmic basis of the scale, each whole number increase in magnitude represents a tenfold increase in measured amplitude; in terms of energy, each whole number increase corresponds to an increase of about 31.6 times the amount of energy released, and each increase of 0.2 corresponds to approximately a doubling of the energy released. Events with magnitudes greater than 4.5 are strong enough to be recorded by a seismograph anywhere in the world, so