Richter magnitude scale against the distance, and found a series of curves that showed a rough correlation with the estimated magnitudes of the earthquakes. Richter resolved some difficulties with this method, then, using data collected by his colleague Beno Gutenberg, produced similar curves, confirming that they could be used to compare the relative magnitudes of different earthquakes. To produce a practical method of assigning an absolute measure of magnitude required additional developments. First, to span the wide range of possible values Richter adopted Gutenberg's suggestion of a logarithmic scale, where each step represents a tenfold increase of magnitude, similar to the magnitude scale
Richter magnitude scale corrections, in that for distances less than 200 kilometers the attenuation is strongly affected by the structure and properties of the regional geology. When Richter presented the resulting scale in 1935 he called it (at the suggestion of Harry Wood) simply a "magnitude" scale. "Richter magnitude" appears to have originated when Perry Byerly told the press that the scale was Richter's, and "should be referred to as such." In 1956 Gutenberg and Richter, while still referring to "magnitude scale", labelled it "local magnitude", with the symbol , to distinguish it from two other scales they had developed, the surface wave