By developing the scale that bears his name, Charles Richter (1900- 1985) not only invented the concept of magnitude as a measure of earthquake size, he turned himself into nothing less than a household word. He remains the only seismologist whose name anyone outside of narrow scientific circles would likely recognise.

Yet few understand the Richter scale itself, and even fewer have even understood the man. Drawing on the wealth of papers Richter left behind, as well as dozens of interviews with his family and colleagues, Hough Hough takes the reader deep into Richter’s complex life story, setting it in the context of his family and interpersonal attachments, his academic career, and the history of seismology.

Among his colleagues Richter was known as intensely private, passionately interested in earthquakes, and iconoclastic. He was an avid nudist, seismologists tell each other with a grin; and he also dabbled in poetry. He was a publicity hound, and, as some suggest, more famous than he deserved to be. But even his closest associates were unaware that he struggled to reconcile an intense and abiding need for artistic expression with his scientific interests, or that his apparently strained relationship with his wife was more unconventional but also stronger than they knew. Moreover, they never realised that his well-known foibles might even have been the consequence of a profound neurological disorder.

In this biography, Susan Hough artfully interweaves the stories of Richter’s life with the history of earthquake exploration and seismology. Being a seismologist herself at the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, Hough has been able to illuminate the world of earth science for the lay reader, much as Sylvia Nasar brought the world of mathematics alive in A Beautiful Mind.

The Preface to Richters Scale starts with two key utterances. In the first of these two, Charles Richter expressed his feeling that “If I have anything to offer, it must be something individual and peculiar to myself” (26 May, 1937). In the second of the quoted statements, Wanda Tucker of Pasadena Star News said, “Charles Richter contributed a lot more than the Richter scale to humanity — he contributed himself” (3 October, 1985).

Then the biographer goes on to show the different aspects of the colourful life of Charles Richter although she has regretted that she did not have a chance to meet the man. In 1981, Hough, then an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, declared a major in geophysics with a specific interest in seismology — just as Charles Richter slipped away from the field having been one of its brightest luminaries for nearly half a century.

Richter spent the last few years of his life away from not only the public eye, but largely also away from the eyes of those who had known him. Richter died on 30 September and his wife had died in 1972. The couple had no children. Throughout his long professional career, Richter worked closely with very few students, leaving him with few professional progeny and no descendants in the biological sense. Even Charles’ and Lillian’s longtime home in Pasadena had vanished, claimed by eminent domain in the late 1960s to make way for the Foothill Freeway.

The author tries to measure the greatness of this elusive scientist by plunging into a study of the magnitude of the problem of measurement of earthquakes. Prior to the 1930s, the best scientific minds in the world had no answer to this problem. Earlier scientists had devised methods to rank the severity of shaking based on its effects at different locations, but never a way to size up the tremors themselves. From 1927, Richter, along with HO Wood and instrumentalist Hugo Benioff began to build, under the patronage of California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the first network of seismometers in the US, specifically designed to record local earthquakes.

Seeking a method that would use the instrumental data, Richter, along with the then most renowned seismologist Beno Gutenberg, took the technique of plotting ground motion against distance presented by the Japanese seismologist Kiyoo Wadati in 1931, and transformed it to produce the motion at a standard distance from measurements made throughout the network, the logarithm of this standardised value gave the relative sizes of earthquakes, a number which Richter called earthquake magnitude.

But Richters Scale is not just about seismological science; it is also about Richter the enigmatic man who remained a riddle even to the seismological community. Richter sometimes showed up at work wearing two ties, and when he wore only one, it always sported a creative collection of stain spots. He was not in the least amused by the clever song, composed by one of his colleagues, that was performed at his retirement party. But, if there were cameras around, you could count on Charlie to be there. These personal foibles, however, fail to measure up the portrait of Charles Richter as no mortal, not especially Richter, deserves to be defined by them.

About his childhood Richer said, “There is little in my childhood that I like to remember or would wish to repeat". This statement sounds viable when we know that his parents were married twice and divorced twice, and that his mother experienced episodes of emotional instability, and unfortunate genetic traits had probably been transferred to Charles as he indulged in extra-marital affairs and suffered physical and mental breakdown right from the age of 15 months when a bout of infantile cholera almost ended his life.

The influence of Lillian Richter, Charles’s mother, did not create any special comfort zone for the enigmatic seismologist. She was not famous enough to be written about in her own right and too loved to be written about at any length by her offspring. Lillian’s absence from Richter’s journal pages does perhaps hint that some motherson issues were left unspoken. One draft of a letter among Richter’s papers goes as follows, “Now please don’t tell me to stay at home and work around there (in that mess of a garbage, for example!). I must get out among men… I have been — forgive me, mother-tied to your apron strings all these years, until I have become almost effeminate”. Hough’s book Richters Scale teems with such personal tidbits.

The author also cites poems written by Richter to express his diverse feelings. One poem, penned in 1967, reveals a poignant sense of anguish about his formative years, “Contentment, so it seems, cannot be trusted / Not only are there perils in the world / But underneath my mind the unschooled ape / The gasping infant and the loveless boy, / Still live in shadow waiting for their turns”. In other chapters, the writer traces Charles’s relationship with Gutenberg, Lillian and many women in his life about whom he said, “Only a few have loved me, but those few /Are no more like by night than by day”.

About his first wife Lillian and his next ladylove Margaret, Charles wrote, “I married Lillian not because I cared for her, but because I needed a woman and she wanted me; I never really lover her. Ten years later, I fell genuinely in love with Margaret, who does not seriously care for me”.

While reading Hough’s book one is reminded of the phenomenon called supernova in which once in a great while a magnificent light blazes brightly but briefly amid the familiar stars in the nighttime sky. It is virtually certain that young Charlie Richter never witnessed such a supernova, and he never imagined that one day he himself would become one. In cosmic terms every human life shines brightly for the mere blink of an eyelash. What set Richter’s life apart, as Hough’s book Richters Scale elaborately explains, was not only the intensity with which it shone, but also the exceptionally brief duration of its greatest brilliance.