Every day, about 55 earthquakes happen around the world. Most are too small to feel. But how do scientists tell the difference between a tiny tremor and a destructive earthquake? Charles Richter, born on April 26, 1900, solved this problem. In 1935, he and another scientist named Beno Gutenberg created the Richter scale at the California Institute of Technology. The scale uses numbers to show how much energy an earthquake releases. Each whole number on the scale represents a huge jump in power. A magnitude 5 earthquake is 32 times stronger than a magnitude 4. A magnitude 6 is about 1,000 times stronger than a magnitude 4. That is why a magnitude 7 earthquake can flatten buildings while a magnitude 3 just rattles dishes on a shelf. Richter was a quiet scientist who did not enjoy being famous. He once said the public only cared about earthquake numbers. They ignored the science behind them, and that annoyed him. Today, scientists use a newer system called the moment magnitude scale for very large earthquakes. But the basic idea Richter pioneered, measuring the ground's shaking with numbers, remains the foundation of how we understand earthquakes.