Richter scale

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Charles F. Richter was a man known for his unusual love of scales. Since early childhood he manifested a constant interest in scales and other methods of weight measuring. During a trip to the Amazon, he found a new species of scale that he took as a pet. He raised the little scale and trained it to measure ever greater weights. He and his scale became great friends.

However, Richter's scale fell off the table it was sitting on during the great earthquake of San Francisco and broke due to the impact.

Unable to repair it, Richter cried bitter tears and promised himself that his scale wouldn't be forgotten. So he paid Randolph Hearst to publish an announcement on the news every time an earthquake happened, to make people remember his little, loved scale. Hearst, an unemployed hobo, was surprised by the donation, but still bore the scars of the loss of his own beloved piece of meat, Roastbeef, which had been condemned by health inspectors and destroyed during the Great Botulism Rush of '49, so he took the cash and became a newspaper proprietor.

Richter's scale was never forgotten: from that moment on, every time an earthquake shatters the earth, everybody in the world remembers the Richter scale.

He never recovered, and spent the rest of his life maundering on the beach gazing out at the Pacific, surviving on seaweed and raw abalone. People would try to interest him. "You're the scales man, aren't you?" they would say. "Well look at this iguana [or gecko, or snake, or tuatara, as it might have been] I've brought along for you. Aren't they beauties? See how they glisten." This did nothing but infuriate Richter, and in the last years of his life his section of the beach was cordoned off and marked with red flags as a hazardous area by the San Francisco city council. Unwary surfers who get dumped on the wrong beach say his ghost still haunts the dunes.