HOW TO GO
WHAT: Charles F. Richter Day
WHEN: 12:30 p.m. April 26. Rain or shine.
WHERE: At the Ohio Historical Marker at the roundabout at the intersection of Busenbark and Trenton roads. Parking at the Busenbark Road extension east of the sign or in Edgewood High School parking lot.
LEARN MORE: Anne Jantzen will also lead a discussion of Charles Richter at 2 p.m. April 28 at the Chrisholm Historic Farmstead, 2070 Woodsdale Road, Trenton
Charles Francis Richter is not the familiar name it could be, according to a group of local historians.
The Butler County native was a seismologist and physicist who, in 1935, invented a way of rating the severity of earthquakes by measuring the shock waves they produced.
Although his calculation formulas were supplanted by a different method of gathering and interpreting data in the 1970s, the scale remained the same and so until recently, “the Richter scale” was still used.
And this makes Anne Jantzen, co-founder of Butler County’s year-old Friends of Charles Richter Society with Terry Stephens, worried that his name and his contributions to the world will fade away into history.
“The Associated Press has stopped using his name when they report on an earthquake, and just say it was of a certain magnitude,” she said.
So last year, as a spin-off from the Friends of Chrisholm group that provides support to the historic Chrisholm Historic Farmstead near Trenton, Jantzen and Stephens organized the first Charles Richter Day on his birthday, April 26, and plan to make it an annual event.
Jantzen said that he’s historically important not only because of his contribution to seismology, but also because of his heritage.
“Charles Richter was the great-great-grandson of Christian and Catherine Augsperger, the Amish pioneers who came here in 1819,” she said, and built the farm now known as the Chrisholm Historic Farmstead.
“He grew up on a farm on Wehr Road in the village of Overpeck, but at the age of 11 his grandfather moved him to California,” she said.
Richter was actually born in 1900 with the surname Kinsinger, the son of Frederick Kinsinger.
Frederick Kinsinger had married Lillian Richter and they had a daughter, Margaret, in 1892, but Lillian refused to move out of her family home, so he left them, Jantzen said. When he came back a few years later, Charles was born, but Lillian still refused to move, so he left again.
“So the grandfather, Charles Otto Richter who worked for Hooven-Owens-Rentschler Company in Hamilton, raised him,” she said.
The grandfather heard about the promise of gold in California, so he moved the family west to become a prospector. Lillian changed her name back to Richter, and when he became of age, Charles did the same.
In a 2007 biography titled “Richter’s Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man,” author Susan Hough spent a chapter speculating that Richter may have had Asperger Syndrome, a disorder on the autism spectrum characterized by having difficulty in social situations.
“He was not very socially adept and had trouble knowing how to react socially,” Jantzen said. “When they moved to California, he couldn’t handle school at first, but his mother enrolled him in a private academy and he did fine there because had a focus on academics.”
When he went to Stanford University, he first majored in chemistry, but the Asperger Syndrome also made him rather clumsy, Jantzen said, and he broke so many beakers that his professor suggested he get into another field. So he became a physicist, and while pursuing his Ph.D. at the California Instutute of Technology, he became fascinated with seismology.
He took a job at a new seismological laboratory in Pasadena and worked with a man named Beno Gutenberg to develop what would become known as the Richter scale.
Richter never traveled much, never came back to Butler County, but he did spend some time in Japan studying earthquakes there.
Although his name is well-known, Jantzen said that few people are very familiar with the man behind the Richter scale.He married, but had no children.
“Hough also suggests that Richter is not very well known because he had no surviving family to promote his legacy,” she said. “His grave went 10 years without a marker until some of his colleagues found out and took care of it.”
The Charles Richter Day celebration will take place around an Ohio Historical Marker erected in his honor in the roundabout at Busenbark and Trenton Roads.
The roundabout will be dedicated as “the Richter Roundabout,” and officials from Butler County and St. Clair Twp. will declare April 26 Charles Richter Day in perpetuity.
“Children should know who he is because even though he struggled, he achieved,” Jantzen said. “He could be a great mentor for young people who are trying to find their way.”
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