Developed in 1935 by Charles Richter in partnership with Beno Gutenberg, both from the California Institute of Technology, the Richter magnitude scale is used to assign a single number to quantify the energy released during an earthquake.
The system operates on a base-10 logarithmic scale, measuring the amplitude of seismic waves recorded upon a seismograph. Being logarithmic, each incremental number on the scale denotes a 10x increase in magnitude - that is, a shaker measuring 5.0 on the Richter Scale is ten times larger as one measuring 4.0.
(via Look At This...)
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