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and magnitudes, that there is danger of neglecting field observations.” 192
Richter himself lost sight of the original meaning of his scale. In 1958, he
argued that epicenters should be located only on the basis of instrumental
data, not the distribution of macroseismic intensity: “the practice . . . of
drawing isoseismals and then locating an 'epicentre' at the centre of the
figure should be discontinued.” 193 even Richter had come to think of mag-
nitude as a replacement for intensity, not a complement to it.
Conclusion
By 1935, California seismology had turned down a path quite different
from the course Wood had charted in three ways. First, it had acquired a
new leader. Beno Gutenberg had earned his fame using Göttingen's seismo-
graphic records to measure the depth of the earth's core. Caltech's president
Robert Millikan pegged him as the future of seismology. to lure Gutenberg
to Pasadena in 1930, Millikan offered him one of the highest salaries at the
university. 194 When Wood contracted his debilitating illness in 1934, Guten-
berg became the effective director of the Seismological Laboratory. there
was no longer any question that the lab would prioritize geophysical stud-
ies of distant tremors over research on local seismicity. 195 Wood speculated
that if he had not fallen sick, seismology might have developed differently:
“Richter would have worked much more with me and less with Gutenberg,
the final Long Beach earthquake paper would have been completed and
published, and other local earthquake papers as well.” 196 this points to a
second divergence: as Goodstein puts it, “technology now led the science.”
Field studies and felt reports were passé. Wood was informed by a colleague
that “the most serious criticism I ever heard anyone make of your work in
Pasadena, was substantially this, that you have the best instruments in the
world but are doing nothing with them.” 197 third, California's seismologists
had taken a new political tack. As Geschwind argues, they learned from the
mistakes of Bailey Willis, who carried his public campaign too far. From
1925, Willis made increasingly bold predictions that a catastrophic earth-
quake would soon hit Southern California—indeed, within ten years. the
evidence on which this claim rested was challenged by business interests
and fellow scientists alike. Willis was publicly chastised, and his colleagues
soured on public relations. the result was a turn away from public outreach,
toward technocratic solutions. From then on, Wood's colleagues tended to
focus on “quietly building consensus among technical experts and fostering
alliances with government bureaucrats, who could bring the power of the
state to bear.” 198
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