A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester

  *It was a harbor they came upon very late in the day: Scores of seamen sailing the Pacific Coast had managed to pass by the entrance without ever turning inside, and the Clinopodium- rich meadowlands were first discovered by a land-based expedition, and not by a sailor at all.

  *Dana, who had first come around the Horn from Boston to Yerba Buena in 1835, had forecast, with remarkable prescience, a glittering future for the region. “If California ever becomes a prosperous country,” he wrote in his famous Two Years Before the Mast, “this bay will be the centre of its prosperity.”

  *As it remains today, in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

  *Among the great San Francisco–based photographers was Arnold Genthe, the remarkable German best known for his sensitive and tender portraits of Chinatown; and Eadweard Muybridge—born Edward Muggeridge outside London, he pretentiously amended his name to achieve greater artistic credibility—who made some immense panoramic photographs of the entire city, and was the first to surmount the technical problems of photographing a horse at the gallop, thus settling a bet with Leland Stanford about whether a galloping horse lifts all its hooves off the ground at once. (The pictures proved that it does.)

  *More than 12,000 Chinese also worked uncomplainingly—though only for gold, not the distrusted paper money—on the most difficult sections of the Central Pacific Railroad’s route east across the mountains to where they would meet up with the Union Pacific’s rails heading west from Omaha. Their legendary courage in working on the fantastically dangerous Cape Horn cliff face near Colfax is memorialized in a plaque—as is their involvement with hundreds of Irishmen in laying the final ten miles of track through the Utah desert in twelve hours flat. They were paid at the rate of a dollar a day, slept in the open, and lived with exemplary frugality on fish, seaweed, and dried oysters.

  *Well built enough to survive 1906 in near-perfect shape, but demolished in 1958, to make way for a parking lot.

  †There was also a domed sixteen-story building at the corner of Market and Third Streets, the tallest building in the American West. It was owned by Claus Spreckels, the sucrose magnate whose fondness for younger women is said by some to have given us the term “sugar daddy.” It housed the offices of the Call, one of the more prominent daily newspapers of the time. Under the dome was a celebrated restaurant, with a much-envied view.

  *For more on the Slot, see note on page 245.

  *And not a few died there. President Warren G. Harding did, under circumstances that some still find mysterious; and King Kalakaua of Hawaii—who of course deemed it entirely appropriate to stay in the Palace—can probably lay claim to being the man with the longest name ever to have passed away there: The register clerk called him “Your Majesty,” but officially he was David Laamea Kamanakapuu Mahinulani Naloiaehuokalani Lumialani Kalakaua.

  *Later performances became more inventive. When Miss Stewart performed it back in Sydney—to help a charity to buy radium for a local hospital—she took to selling oranges to audience members during the intermission.

  *Animals seem peculiarly sensitive to impending seismic doom. A baby elephant penned into a Batavian hotel room went spectacularly mad a short while before the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883; and just before the Sumatran earthquake and tsunamis of December 2004, reports of animals behaving oddly—monkeys chattering with terror, snakes going rigid, cattle bolting—were legion.

  *Because of its double tram tracks Market Street was the widest boulevard in the city. Horse-drawn wagons occupied the outer parts of the street, and the cable cars were confined to a metal channel, which came to be called the Slot. Before long this became an important social demarcation line in the city: Living “south of the Slot” suggested blue-, rather than white-collar.

  *This is a near-perfect example of what is known by the very old and now rarely used English word chance-medley, in which a casualty occurs as a result of a confusing set of circumstances in which only a small element is accidental. There was once a crime known as “manslaughter-by-chance-medley,” though what took place here was clearly not a crime.

  *One supposed rescue did point up the troubles of some asylum patients. Three days after the event rescuers heard a man crying, “Never mind me, get the others first!” and naturally raced to free this heroic victim. But it was no miracle: The man turned out to be a patient who had escaped from his guards and had buried himself, the better to win attention.

  *I am not including the places where the event was recorded by machines: Plenty of seismographs existed in 1906, and the San Francisco event was recorded by many, some of them—as we shall see—thousands of miles away.

  *These figures are computed from the earthquake’s newly established true epicenter beside Mussel Rock in the suburb of Daly City. But, generally speaking, because most of the damage occurred in San Francisco, it is simpler to think of this much-better-known city as the practical center point of the event’s effects.

  *The names were indeed splendid: There were the Repsold-Zöllner Horizontal Pendulums, for example, used at the observatories in Tashkent and Irkutsk; the Stiattesi Vertical Pendulum used in Florence; the Vincenti-Konkoly Vertical Pendulums of Zagreb (where the observatory director was Dr. Mohorovicic, later to give his name to one of the world’s major geological features); the Ehlert Triples employed at Kremsmünster in Austria and at the famous Uccle Observatory in Belgium; and Dr. Hecker’s magnificently titled Von Rebeur–Paschwitz Horizontal Pendulum, which apparently performed yeoman service in the main physics laboratory in late-nineteenth-century Potsdam.

  *An Irish-born engineer named Robert Mallet came up with the term—from the Greek for “earthquake,” seismos—in 1854. Mallet was a man of many talents: His legacy includes a steam-powered barrel-washing machine made for Guinness, a pair of powerful siege cannons, critical parts of the Fastnet Lighthouse, and a number of swivel bridges over the river Shannon.

  *Thomas Jefferson Jackson See was a brilliant and notoriously ill-tempered astronomer, a maverick who is generally reckoned to have squandered his boundless potential by opposing Einstein’s theory of relativity and espousing the so-called wave theory of gravitation.

  *This was one of six stations sited precisely on latitude 39° 08’ N, designed to measure how much the North Pole wobbled around it axis (which would cause latitude to shift as it did so). The other stations were in Misuzawa, Japan; Tschardjui, Russia; Carloforte, Italy; and near the American cities of Cincinnati and Gaithersburg.

  *Because the local damage is so severe the aberrant behavior of a place like this can also make it appear, temptingly, as though it deserves to be the epicenter. This is the kind of red herring that modern geologists take care to avoid.

  *Among the most poignant images of Stanford’s ruin was a marble statue of the great biologist Louis Agassiz, which tumbled from a great height, speared its way, headfirst, into the cement courtyard and stuck there, helplessly pinned. There was much greater damage than this; but somehow a figure of great learning thrust so ignominiously to earth struck a chord. It also prompted the university’s then-president to remark that he had always thought more easily of Agassiz in the concrete rather than the abstract.

  *Or Edmund Parquet—the spellings of victims’ and witnesses’ names have become hopelessly confused in the years since.

  *My italics. The dismal reputation of the city and its practices had spread even into the dusty distant halls of the Geological Survey.

  *Among the early rectors of this Gold Rush relic was the Reverend James Bush, whose great- and then great-great-grandsons went on to be American presidents.

  *The task of clearing away these bricks brought out a curious assortment of bedfellows. John Barrymore was found beside one ruined building, stacking some in piles under a soldier’s orders. A friend promptly remarked of the notoriously idle actor that “it took a convulsion of Nature to get Jack out of bed, and the United States Army to get him to work.”

  *The Geological Survey report noted that fully thre
e-quarters of the city’s iron safes failed to protect their contents from the subsequent fires. Most tragically of all, merchants often opened safes that were still red hot, with costly consequences: The moment the superheated insides were exposed to fresh air and oxygen, the paper contents—Treasury bills and negotiable securities—burst into flames, bringing sudden financial ruin to owners who had been optimistic but who now looked helplessly on at the blaze. After this, prudent merchants waited for as much as two weeks before allowing safecrackers to free what they hoped would be their now properly cooled treasures.

  †It led a local poetaster to compose what has become a famous stanza: “If, as some say, God spanked the town / For being much too frisky. / Why did he burn the churches down / And save Hotaling’s whiskey?” But A. P. Hotaling himself did not get off entirely: His house in Pacific Heights, near the junction of California and Franklin Streets, was dynamited as a firebreak.

  *All internal communications links, and most external ones too, had been broken by the earthquake. Local telephone exchanges were hastily abandoned. Only one secure military telephone circuit, two commercial telegraph lines that went across the Bay to Oakland, and the trans-Pacific cable to Manila were working after the shock waves hit.

  *Many will ask: What is this worth in today’s money? It is a complex question, since countless factors are at play that alter the real and perceived value of money over time. Economists have, however, developed a number of algorithms that can assign value: and so, for example, the $500 million in 1906 dollars is said in terms of the Consumer Price Index to be worth $10 billion today; in terms of the nominal Gross Domestic Product, $8 billion; when measured by comparing the price of unskilled labor now and then, $45 billion; when rated by GDP per capita, $57 billion; and when measured by comparing the total values of GDP, $195 billion. So the modern value of the destruction can be said to range across two orders of magnitude—almost as much a variation as the suggested magnitude of the earthquake itself.

  *So delighted, in fact, that he caught a train directly into the city that very day—luckily making the only one that ran.

  *Famous as “Purveyors of Parisian Skin Lotion, Carson’s Cough Cure, Opera Cream and—Free from Anything which can Possibly Injure the Skin—Opera Face Powder.”

  *Since DeMille did not begin to make films until eight years after the earthquake, this may well have been an apocryphal story. But Genthe was very much involved in Hollywood in later years, and the dark and brooding publicity portraits of Greta Garbo that he made in 1925 are widely credited with jump-starting the career of the newly arrived actress.

  *Sensibly, those who feared a superabundance of machismo on the ticket chose instead an anodyne Indiana senator named Charles Fairbanks, remembered only by Alaskans, whose second city is named after him.

  *The Socialist Voice, eternally primed to pounce, condemned Schmitz’s pronouncement, less for its self-evident illegality than for its hypocrisy. The mayor, said the journal, had been conducting his own looting for years, so “why should the poor little looter who is scraping something together to live on for a little longer, be shot to death?”

  *San Franciscans are still angry about the wholesale use of dynamite in 1906, claiming that it seemed to do more harm than good—destroying much more than was needed in order to curb the fires. And even today, playing “what if” with all the various factors of the firefighting in the city can be counted on for spirited dinner-party conversations.

  *And mule-drawn latrine-emptying wagons belonging to a newborn firm called Odorless Excavators, Inc.

  *But sans Caruso, who had left for New York as soon as he could find a suitable train.

  *This pleasingly archaic term, or its French equivalent, sous cachet volant, was once much used by diplomats. In meant that the message carried a seal, but was not closed up by it, so that anyone to whom it was sent could read the contents and then send them on to their final destination. It indicates the very lowest level of official secrecy.

  *Livermore was also said to have made $100 million selling short at the time of the 1929 Wall Street crash. Not the most content of men, he frequently went bankrupt, spent wildly, married often, and killed himself in 1940.

  *My italics.

  *Glossolalia, another form of speaking in tongues that Pentecostalists take as a Spirit-induced sign of their rapture, differs from xenolalia in that it is comprehensively unintelligible, dismissed by skeptics as gibberish.

  *Jennie Moore went on to become Seymour’s wife.

  *Job 9:6; Psalms 18:7; Isaiah 2:19; Isaiah 13:13; Isaiah 24:1; Isaiah 26:5; Nahum 1:5; Revelation 16:18.

  *The top was shaved away by bulldozers in the middle of the last century to allow a nest of Nike missiles to be placed there during the cold war, one of several missile sites designed to protect the city from Moscow’s potential mischiefs.

  *Previously little happened on the island but for the occasional duel (until dueling was banned in 1854). The best-known contest, following a bitter argument over slavery, pitted a circuit court judge against a state senator: The senator lost, and died.

  *Any white passengers had their passports inspected, with courtesy, onboard ship.

  *Father of Henry Cowell, the great American composer.

  *The legislators have evidently held mixed feelings about the murals, first displaying them in the capitol rotunda, then demoting them to storage, finally bringing them back—but this time to a smaller rotunda in the basement, where they will probably remain for good.

  †Such as the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers Project of the Depression years. Had the artists of the time not been supported, many would likely have starved. Such was not the case in San Francisco in 1906: Artists could always push off to places less likely to be ruined, and evidently did.

  *These were the Chronicle and the Mills buildings and the Merchants’ Exchange: All three would be badly damaged in 1906.

  *He and his brother, Charles, teenagers from St. Louis, founded the paper in 1865, supposedly with a borrowed $20 gold coin. The paper was a muckraking scandal sheet, and Charles was shot dead by an enraged reader; Michael was attacked by a gunman some years later, but lived.

  *The all-too-complicated system of magnitude scales and intensity scales is explained, as well as possible, in the appendix.

  *Reclaimed land is always vulnerable to seismic interruption. Should a major quake hit Manhattan, the many towers built on its only significant area of landfill—Battery Park City—will all probably collapse. And if Hong Kong, a landfill capital, should ever be hit, beware.

  *Volcanoes offer up myriad subtle signs of impending eruptions, and by and large humankind nowadays gets out of their way when danger threatens. The onrush of the 2004 Bay of Bengal tsunamis could have been predicted—in places alerts could have been given two or three hours before the waves struck, had a system been in place. But earthquakes, alone of the trinity of seismic danger, are still entirely unpredictable; and huge sums are being spent on research to see if some clue, somewhere, might be found that would allow for a moderately reliable and infallible warning. So far, nothing.

  *Although Beaufort is inextricably linked in the public mind with the measurement of wind, he is better known among sailors as perhaps the greatest hydrographer of all time, with more than a thousand nautical charts of every corner of the maritime world to his credit. He also performed his work under some physical duress: In a battle at Malaga, before he began his work as mapmaker and gale-measurer, he was wounded no fewer than nineteen times, sixteen times by musket balls and three times by a Spanish cutlass. He was given a pension of £45 for his pains.

  *The 1906 St. Lucia quake mentioned in chapter 1 was reinterpreted in the 1970s using the MSK64 Scale, and, as mentioned, was given an intensity rating of between VII and VIII. It was not assigned a Richter magnitude because of the very small number of seismograms that recorded it—seismographic information being crucial for working out magnitude, as we shall see.

&nbs
p; *The volt, watt, ohm, hertz, kelvin, farad, henry, newton, pascal, Beaufort Scale, Planck’s constant, and Avogadro number are among the Richter scale’s close contenders.

  *Specifically Richter decreed that the base measurements should be those derived from traces recorded on a simple seismograph with a torsion suspension of the mass, of the type named for H. O. Wood and J. Anderson, the geophysicists who first created it.