During one summer's stay at Newport, Rhode Island, Richards met Professor Josiah Parsons Cooke of Harvard, who showed the young boy Saturn's rings through a small telescope.

After the family's return to the United States, he entered Haverford College, Pennsylvania in 1883 at the age of 14, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in 1885.

Richards continued on at Harvard, taking as his dissertation topic the determination of the atomic weight of oxygen relative to hydrogen.

[citation needed] Next he performed a year of post-doctoral work in Germany, where he studied under Victor Meyer at the University of Göttingen and others.

He became one of the first American scientists ever offered a full professorship in a major European university, from Göttingen, in 1901, but instead of taking the position, he chose to continue in America.

[7] Among the potential sources of error Richards uncovered in such determinations was the tendency of certain salts to occlude gases or foreign solutes on precipitation.

Other scientific work of Theodore Richards included investigations of the compressibilities of atoms, heats of solution and neutralization, and the electrochemistry of amalgams.