How was the Richter scale for measuring earthquakes developed?
Here’s what Charles Richter had to say about the invention process, it’s a fascinating article that I got from http://inventors.about.com/od/qrstartinventors/a/Charles_Richter.htm How did you become interested in seismology? CHARLES RICHTER: It was really a happy accident. At Caltech, I was working on my Ph.D. in theoretical physics under Dr. Robert Millikan. One day he called me into his office and said that the Seismological Laboratory was looking for a physicist; this was not my line, but was I at all interested? I talked with Harry Wood who was in charge of the lab; and, as a result, I joined his staff in 1927. What were the origins of the instrumental magnitude scale? CHARLES RICHTER: When I joined Mr. Wood’s staff, I was mainly engaged in the routine work of measuring seismograms and locating earthquakes, so that a catalog could be set up of epicenters and times of occurrence. Incidentally, seismology owes a largely unacknowledged debt to the persistent efforts of Harry O. Wood f
