Intensity, not force

Charles Richter, born in 1900, was, in the words of his biographer, ‘a nerd among nerds: regarded as peculiar and intensely private even by scientists’ standards. And we’re talking about people who put red-and-white bumper stickers on their cars that read, “If this sticker is blue, you’re driving too fast”.’ The only seismologist most of us will ever have heard of was a crumpled, driven, disorganised figure, sometimes kindly and sometimes cantankerous — just as one wants one’s batty scientists to be.

He conducted long, cheerful conversations with himself. He was prone to turn up to work wearing two ties at once. During the lunch-break at a meeting of the geology faculty at Caltech, he pulled out an egg, gave it a sharp tap on the counter, and watched with dismay as a mess of raw egg slid down the table. ‘I thought it was hard-boiled when I got it out of the refrigerator,’ he muttered. An introverted, clumsy and physically unprepossessing character, he may well still have been a virgin at 27. He had no children and few if any really close friends. He was a devoted Trekkie, and wrote a (rejected) science fiction novel of his own called Outlaws of Zem. And he lived for his work. ‘Many feel a passionate calling towards their chosen profession,’ writes Hough. ‘Few have gone so far as to install a seismometer in their living room.’ Quite so. And there, in a rather charming photograph, it is: right by the grandfather clock, the by then elderly scientist peering down on it fondly.

There was more to him than the nerd cliché, however. Many of his closest colleagues had no idea of his hinterland. (Many of his closest colleagues, mind you, had no idea he had a stepson.) As much as he was absorbed by science, he was tormented by the yearning to express himself artistically.