Special Note: This article will concentrate on the life work of Mr. John Harrison, an 18th century clockmaker who, through literally decades of work, changed maritime navigation forever. It is not meant to be an in-depth look at the history of finding longitude, which is something that would take up the space of several articles!

A Problem at Sea

These days, navigation at sea is pretty easy. You have GPS, you have radio, you have compasses, clocks, maps and a million other navigational aids to get your ship from A to B nice and safe…dependent, of course, on the weather. But that’s now in the 21st Century. Three hundred years ago, maritime navigation was nowhere near as easy. Mariners were in constant danger of getting lost at sea due to not knowing where they were, how far they had travelled and how far they still had to go. On a ship at sea with limited supplies and limited time to find safe harbour, not knowing your position was a serious safety-hazard.

As everyone who’s passed highschool geography ought to know, the world is divided up in a grid by lines of latitude (horizontal lines that wrap around the earth and which stack up on each other), and lines of longitude, which go around the earth from east to west, meeting at the North and South Poles at the top and bottom of the globe. Back in the early 1700s and even before this, taking one’s ship out to sea was a dangerous endeavour. Once beyond the sight of land, it was very difficult to fix one’s position, and therefore know how far your ship had travelled.

The position of the sun changes at noon, due to the curvature of the earth; this is why at extreme points on the earth, such as near the poles, you might have full sun at midnight and nothing at all at midday. Sailors were able to determine their north-south latitude position by measuring the angle of the sun at noon against the horizon. This measurement obtained, they were able to mark on a chart, how far north or south they were of the midpoint of latitudes, the Equator. However, finding out how far east or west you were of a given position was considered impossible, because this required knowing very accurately, what the time was.

“Okay so you need to know what the time is to find your spot on the earth. Get a clock or a watch, dunk it on the ship and let’s go!” you probably say.

It isn’t that easy.

Clocks in the 17th and 18th centuries were large pendulum clocks (also called ‘grandfather’ clocks). Although a pendulum clock could keep almost perfect time on land, its ability to keep accurate time at sea was greatly diminished due to the fact that sailing ships rock, pitch, roll and sway on the ocean waves. Such aggressive movements threw the pendulum’s swing (and thus, the clock’s timekeeping abilities) off-beat, rendering the clock useless. The only watches available were old-fashioned pocket-watches, which, although they required no stable surface to keep time, unlike the pendulum clock, they were often not manufactured to such a level of quality as to keep time accurately at sea. Pocket-watches often varied several minutes a day. While to us a minute of difference either way doesn’t sound serious, a minute lost or gained at sea meant being off your position by as much as four degrees. If again, this doesn’t sound serious, it actually meant the possibility of being off your course and position by a matter of several miles.

Telling Time at Sea

While there were several proposals put forward on how to accurately determine a ship’s longitude, the one which most people are familiar with today, is the one involving time. The earth revolves at a constant rate. A full 360 degrees in twenty-four hours, or fifteen degrees each hour. By knowing the time at two places at once, a navigator could calculate fairly easily, his ship’s position of longitude.

If a ship left England at noon and sailed for America, it would be able to determine its position by checking the time on its sea-clock or marine chronometer, as is the correct term. When the chronometer showed it was noon in England, the navigator had to wait until it was noon onboard his ship and record the time-difference. A difference of two hours meant the ship had travelled thirty degrees (since the earth turns 15 degrees each hour). In theory, this was simple, but as I mentioned, the clocks available in the 1700s meant that keeping accurate time at sea was all but impossible.

John Harrison

After a series of catastrophic shipwrecks in the early 1700s, it was decided that the British Government had to put some serious thought into the safety of British sailors. In 1714, the year that King George I came to the throne and heralded the start of the Georgian Era, a board was set up, called the Board of Longitude. Its purpose was to judge and examine any and all schemes for successfully determining a ship’s position of longitude at sea. A prize of twenty thousand pounds sterling, was offered to any person or group of persons who successfully produced a device or a method by which longitude could be accurately determined at sea.

Enter John Harrison.

You couldn’t possibly find a more unlikely person to be the man who would change history so momentously, and who tackled the biggest technological problem of his generation. John Harrison was born in 1693. In 1714, he was a mere twenty-one years of age. John was born in the village of Foulby in West Yorkshire, the first of five children. His father made a modest living as a carpenter.

In 1700, the Harrison family moved to the village of Barrow-Upon-Humber in North Lincolnshire, the village where Harrison would spend almost the rest of his life.

In the 18th century it was common for children to follow their parents into their chosen professions. Watchmakers gave birth to watchmakers, lawyers to lawyers and carpenters to carpenters. With his father’s occupation as a carpenter, it was inevitable that John Harrison would follow his father into the woodworking trade. Only, instead of working on furniture, young John concentrated on something else. Clocks. He spent countless hours examining, disassembling and reassembling clocks and watches, until he knew them as well as he knew himself. One legend goes that when he was sick with smallpox in 1699, he was given a pocket watch to play with while in bed. He spent hours winding up the watch, holding it in his hands, looking at it, listening to it and opening it up to look at all the fiddly little moving parts inside it. By his early twenties, Harrison, who had previously been a bellringer at the local church as well as an apprentice carpenter to his father, officially decided that he would become a clockmaker. He completed his first, fully-functional clock in 1713 at the age of twenty.

Harrison was very good at what he did. A perfectionist with perhaps a slight twinge of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Harrison went over his pendulum clocks over and over and over again, checking and re-checking everything to make his machines more accurate. Considering that Harrison never had any formal education, never went to school and never went to university, he was doing very well in understanding such complex machines as mechanical clocks. Harrison had quite a reputation for his clocks. In an era where a good clocks kept time to a few minutes a week, Harrison’s clocks boasted accuracy to a few SECONDS a MONTH.

This clock, manufactured almost entirely of wood, was completed by John Harrison in 1717, at the age of 24!

The Longitude Prize

Sooner or later, Harrison was bound to find out about the longitude prize. With his background in clockmaking, Harrison was quick to grasp the fact that knowing one’s position at sea was best determined by knowing accurately, the time in two places at once: Onboard ship and at a home port. Unfortunately, as he also realised, such clocks as those which existed in the 1700s, were woefully inaccurate for the task which they would have to perform. Harrison, like so many others before him, recognised these problems with a clock keeping time at sea.

1. Temperature. Mechanical timepieces keep different times in different temperatures. Hot temperatures cause them to slow down, cold temperatures cause them to speed up. This is due to the wood or the metal inside the timepiece reacting to the temperature around it.

2. Humidity. Moisture affects how smoothly a clock runs. Condensation brought about by rapid temperature-changes could cause a clock to rust or collect water, which would slow it down.

3. Motion. The rocking, rolling, plunging and heaving of early sailing-ships meant that the clock or watch would be subjected to massive amounts of sudden and violent movement. A significant enough jolt, such as that produced by a ship sliding down the trough between two waves to impact against the next wave coming foward, would be enough to throw a clock off its accuracy, rendering it useless. And even without the storms, a swaying, rocking ship would not allow a clock’s pendulum to swing back and forth reliably enough to keep time.

To solve all these problems, Harrison knew he had to do some very careful thinking. By the 1720s, Harrison’s experience in clockmaking and timekeeping was significant. His fanaticisim with accuracy meant that he tested his clocks to make sure that they kept perfect time under every single variation he could think of. He solved the problem of clocks keeping time through temperature-differences by placing two clocks in two rooms in his house during a frigid day in winter. He built a great fire in the fireplace of one room and kept the other room freezing cold. He synchronised both clocks and then kept a check on how fast or slow each of the clocks were and adjusting their pendulums correctly.

Despite never having gone to school, despite never being taught how to read and write except through his own determination, Harrison wrote reams and reams of paper, covering his research into the affects of temperature, lubrication and the use of various metals had on his clocks. After years of research and experimentation, Harrison was ready to have a shot at the Longitude Prize.

There was just one problem.

Due to the great inaccuracy of clocks at the time, no scientist, naval or government official believed that any clock could be produced that would ever keep time at sea. This prejudice against clocks was widespread and it even included one of the most famous scientists of the day: Sir Isaac Newton. Harrison knew that he would have to be incredibly good with his work if he ever had a chance of claiming his twenty-thousand pound prize.

Time and Patience

Harrison made a total of five marine chronometers in his life, three clocks and two pocket-watches. His first clock, “H1”, was presented for trials in 1736. Harrison was forty-three years old.

A model of H1. The two counterweights at the top of the clock (linked by the metal coil in the middle) were designed to swing back and forth, to act as shock-absorbers against the rock and roll of the ship

H1 was taken for trials and Harrison accompanied his creation on his first and only trip to sea. His ship, the HMS Centurion, travelled from England to Portugal, docking in Lisbon. From there, Harrison caught the HMS Orford back to England. The crew of the Orford were much impressed by Harrison’s newfangled invention and praised him for his efforts. The Board of Longitude was also sufficiently impressed to pay him two hundred pounds sterling towards the development of another clock.

Harrison’s next clock, H2 was completed a few years later. Harrison knew that his clock had to be stronger and tougher. It was a machine, not a showpiece. This clock was more boxy and compact than H1, but it kept time just as well.

An old photograph of H2

The War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748) meant that Harrison wasn’t allowed to take his newest sea-clock on a trial voyage. Military officials were worried that the clock might fall into enemy hands. Instead, the Board of Longitude gave Harrison another five hundred pounds towards further development of his machines. The result was H3.

John Harrison’s marine chronometer officially called “H3”

While Harrison was happy with H3, he soon decided that he’d been wasting his life all these decades. While Harrison’s clocks all kept wonderful time and while they could be used at sea successfully, Harrison just wasn’t convinced that this was the right way to go. Clocks were bulky, expensive, delicate machines that took up space on a ship which had very little space to give. Frustrated, Harrison gave up on trying to make marine clocks and instead did a complete, 180-degree turn and considered manufacturing a marine watch instead.

The watch in the 18th century was the pocket-watch. A large, round, bulky thing, but small for the period. Most watches were expensive, but kept only mediocre time. Harrison was sure that he could improve on then-current designs, and come up with a masterpiece.

To help him in this endeavour, Harrison consulted a man named John Jeffreys, a professional watchmaker. Jeffreys agreed to manufacture a pocket watch for Harrison. But there was one catch. It was to Harrison’s own personal design. Jeffreys accepted the challenge and set to work.

When the watch, now known as “H4”, was completed, it was so incredibly accurate that Harrison was probably slamming his head against the wall at his own stupidity for wasting his life fiddling around with clocks instead of pocket-watches! H4 took six years to complete and was finally ready for testing in 1761, by which stage Harrison was nearly seventy years old!

Far too old to go to sea again, Harrison’s son, Joseph, agreed to test his father’s watch. Joseph boarded a ship, the HMS Deptford and set sail for Jamaica. After weeks at sea, Joseph Harrison determined that his father’s watch was off by a mere…five seconds.

Harrison’s masterpiece: H4

The Board of Longitude were not pleased. And neither would you be, if everything you said was wrong was suddenly proven right, and a watch or a clock could keep accurate time at sea! The father-son team of John and Joseph Harrison awaited their prize-money of twenty thousand pounds.

Which never came.

The Board of Longitude demanded another test. The outraged Harrisons had no choice but to oblige them, if only to prove them wrong, and Joseph Harrison packed his bags for another voyage, this time to Barbados. The watch didn’t fare quite so well this time, with Joseph making the inaccuracy to be thirty-nine seconds out. But things were made even worse by the appearance of a man named Nevil Maskelyne.

Maskelyne was easily Harrison’s arch-rival in the race for the Longitude Prize. Maskelyne was a proponent of the ‘Lunar Distance’ method of determining longitude at sea.
The moon moves at a constant rate around the earth; twelve degrees a day. By measuring the angles between the moon and sun before one left England and measuring these angles later when the moon was over the horizon, one could determine how far one had travelled.

There was one big problem with Maskelyne’s lunar-distance method. It was highly complicated; and most seamen were not mathematics whizzes who specialised in geometry. While Maskelyne’s method did work, Harrison believed it wholly impractical at sea due to how long it would take to calculate distance.

Claiming the Prize

Upon Joseph’s return to England, the Harrisons once again presented their results to the Board of Longitude. This time, the Board could not ignore the papers in front of them. Once is beginner’s luck. But…twice?

The Harrisons demanded their prize and were eventually offered ten thousand pounds sterling, if they agreed to turn over H4 for duplication by other watchmakers. The Harrisons did so, but the money was not forthcoming. In a twist of fate that must’ve made John Harrison rip his hair off his head, his rival, Maskelyne, was made Astronomer Royal, and thus, a member of the Board of Longitude, who could therefore influence the Board’s decisions. Maskelyne managed to find a loophole in the criteria for claiming the prize-money and effectively told the Harrisons to get lost and that they weren’t allowed the twenty thousand pounds.

Infuriated, Joseph Harrison took a pen and a piece of paper and in a very bold move, wrote directly to the one man he was sure could help him and his father claim the money which they knew was theirs.

While Joseph worked on his letters, John went back to watchmaking. In the 1760s and 70s, he created his fifth and final marine chronometer, H5. In 1772, Joseph finally had success.

The two Harrisons had managed to obtain a private audience with the King of England.

King George III listened patiently while the father and son team beat out their case in front of him. His Majesty was moved by their plight and was obviously not pleased at what was happening. He whispered to an aide that the two men had been “cruelly wronged”. After much consideration, George III took Harrison’s latest creation, H5, and performed accuracy tests on it himself, checking its timekeeping day in and day out for ten weeks, from May to July in 1772. George III, though famous for going positively looney, deaf and blind towards the last years of his life, was, amongst other things, an avid lover of science and technology. His observations told him that H5 kept time to 1/3 of a second a day! A phenomenal feat of accuracy in a day and age when a regular pocket-watch kept time to a minute a day! Eventually, the king called the Harrisons before him and advised them on a course of action. He suggested that the two Harrisons petition Parliament into giving them the twenty thousand pounds of prize-money and told them that if Parliament refused, to further add that the king himself would enter the chamber and give the entire house a good talking-to.

Well…no politician wants to be told off in public by his king.

Finally, in 1773, John Harrison got…well…some money. Eight-thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds sterling, from Parliament, for his efforts.

If we add up all of the money that Harrison recieved for his work, we’ll find that it totals a whopping twenty-three thousand and sixty-five pounds! However, the official Longitude Prize of twenty-thousand pounds was never awarded to anyone, even though it should rightly have gone to John and Joseph Harrison.

Even when Harrison realised how much money he was making, he still wasn’t happy. He’d never recieved the public recognition of his achievements that he’d hoped for. It was as if the people in charge turned red-faced with embarrassment, shoved over a pouch of gold and then slammed the door in his face. By now, Harrison was eighty years old. Harrison had spent almost literally, his whole life trying to solve the biggest technological problem of his age, and he was never even thanked properly.

In the end, Harrison died at the age of eighty-three, barely able to live in retirement for a decent length of time to enjoy his riches. He passed away, aged 83, on the 24th of March, 1776. Ironically…the date of his death, was also the date of his birth, exactly 83 years before in 1693. He was buried in the churchyard of St. John’s Church, in Hampstead, London, alongside his second wife, Elizabeth, and their son William.

Harrison’s Legacy

Some people say that an artist’s work is never truly appreciated until they’re dead. In Harrison’s case, this was almost certainly it. Although he never recieved the fame, fortune and acclaim that he had hoped for in his own lifetime, Harrison’s lifetime of work saw the expansion of the British Empire by making sea-travel much, much safer.

And yet…despite all his efforts, marine chronometers were not widely used, initially. Their high manufacturing cost meant that these amazing machines were out of the reach of all but the wealthiest of seamen; those who had made lots of money as merchant captains or officers in the Navy, who could afford to purchase an expensive and accurate sea-clock for their ships. But as years went by, the use of marine chronometers eventually increased, until they were declared obsolete in the late 20th century, by the coming of GPS.

A marine chronometer clock, of the kind that was common from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries. The clock is housed in a special wooden case and is mounted on a gimbal so that it swivels and pivots. This way, the clock always lies flat, even if the ship is rolling and heaving at sea

Harrison’s clocks and watches were rediscovered in the early 20th century by Rupert Thomas Gould, a Royal Navy officer. He is credited with documenting, examining, restoring and preserving Harrison’s clocks and saving them from total destruction. It is thanks to his research and restoration-skills that H1, H2, H3, H4 and H5 are still around today. H1-3 have been reassembled and restored to operational condition. They may be seen at the National Maritime Museum at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, England. H4 is also restored, but H5 still requires restoration. Only H1, 2 and 3 are in operation, however, since H4 and H5 require significant lubrication to operate successfully, whereas H1, 2 and 3 do not.

H5 (currently unrestored); the last marine chronometer that Harrison made, and the very one which was tested by King George III himself

The recent Chilean earthquake, registering a needle-shaking 8.8 on the Richter Scale, reminded me of a very famous historical event that happened well over a century ago today, but which is still mentioned in documentaries, in books, in school assignments and probably most famously, in a 1936 film starring Spencer Tracy and Hollywood tough-guy Clarke Gable. The film, appropriately called ‘San Francisco’, brought to the silver screen the true horrors of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, in such terrifying realism that it literally sent earthquake survivors stupid enough to watch the movie, to the hospital, suffering from panic-attacks. The film’s famous earthquake sequence, which was a true piece of special-effects wizardry in the mid 1930s, remains one of the most famous snippets of motion-picture entertainment history to this day.

But if something on the screen of a movie-theatre could send people running off in fright, what was the real event like? The one that took place thirty years before? Surely that must’ve been more terrifying than anything that Hollywood could produce, if even the mere artistic mention of it sent grown men and women fleeing from cinemas in the middle of a movie!

The Great Quake of 1906

The Great Earthquake of 1906 is one of San Francisco’s most famous natural disasters. A tremor that lasted only a few seconds reduced the famous coastal city to smoking ruins, killed thousands and left an entire city homeless. The raging fires that started after the earthquake subsided could challenge Chicago and London in terms of ferocity and terror. The destruction of the city was absolute, with only a few buildings left standing, but what was San Francisco like in the early 1900s?

The City by the Bay

San Francisco at the start of the 20th Century, just as it is now at the start of the 21st, was a bustling, exciting, modern city; a west coast melting pot of cultures, styles and nationalities. Built in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, San Francisco’s rapid growth, modernisation and rise in wealth was due in no small part to the California Gold Rush of the 1840s and 50s. The Rush had brought thousands of people to California, forcing San Francisco’s population to boom from about 500 people in the 1840s, to 410,000 people by the turn of the century. San Francisco boasted (and still does boast) the largest Chinatown in all of the USA. Its famous cable streetcar-system was iconic throughout the world, its steep streets were only for the athletic or the stupid to try and climb. Intelligent people rode the cablecars which were able to cope with the steep inclines.

Sourdough bread, with its distinctive, tangy flavour was invented in San Francisco at the turn of the century by immigrant bakers who settled there during the Gold Rush. The salty air around Fisherman’s Wharf interfered with the bread’s natural baking process, giving it a slightly sour and decidedly delicious flavour which the city is still famous for today. San Francisco was also famous for its idyllic and picturesque Victorian-style houses which ranged from narrow tenements and terraces to large, grand mansions, all painted distinctive and eye-catching pastel-shades and with their peculiar, angled bay windows. San Francisco was truly a modern, successful, popular and glamorous city. But all this was about to change.

A Rude Awakening

The earthquake that reduced San Francisco to rubble in 1906 struck at the unpardonably rude hour of 5:12am on the morning of Wednesday, the 18th of April, with a jolt so powerful that it threw many people right out of their beds! Modern seismologists now believe that the earthquake that struck San Francisco that morning registered a jaw-rattling 7.8 on the Richter Scale! An earthquake powerful enough to destroy buildings. Records from 1906 suggest that the vibrating lasted anywhere from twenty seconds to nearly a minute, clocking out at about forty-two seconds in total. While this amount of time would often come and go like a sneeze to most of us, when your whole house is shaking, it feels like a lot longer.

The earthquake caused untold levels of damage. Several buildings collapsed right into the street. The majority of San Francisco’s infrastructure was made of masonary or timber, materials not ideally suited for building in an earthquake-prone area. Many of San Francisco’s new ‘skyscraper’-style buildings were destroyed entirely, or were devoured by the flames that came later. San Francisco’s famous cable-car system was ripped up, twisted around and mangled beyond all practical use. Several lines were damaged beyond repair and many of the city’s iconic cablecars were destroyed in their barns when the structures either collapsed, crushing the cars inside, or caught fire, burning the vehicles where they stood.

A pair of classic, San Francisco Victorian terrace-houses destroyed in the earthquake

The death-toll from the earthquake was originally reported as small, a ‘mere’ 370-odd people had died. However, the true number was considerably higher, and is now believed to have been at least 3,000 or more. The damage to the city was thought to be about $400,000,000 (that’s four hundred million 1906 dollars). About $6-$7 billion dollars today.

The original earthquake was a real shaker. There were at least two aftershocks after it, which caused the next great disaster to strike the city in twenty-four hours.

San Francisco was riding high before the earthquake struck. It was the biggest, busiest and most prosperous city on the US. West Coast before the 18th of April. It was a marvellous and modern metropolis full of the all the latest gadgets and gizmoes, like electrical lighting, telephones, telegraphs, gas-mains and running water. The earthquake destroyed all of these. Power-lines toppled, cutting off telegraph communications, telephone communications and causing a citywide blackout. The rupturing gas-mains which sent natural gas to kitchens as well as the buildings which still used gas-lighting, meant that all it took was one spark to set off a bomb. The sparking electrical wires from downed telephone and telegraph wires soon set the gas on fire and within minutes, the rubble of the earthquake was burning out of control.

Photograph of Sacramento Street, San Francisco, 18th April 1906. At the bottom of the photo you can see the city’s famous cable-car tracks. In the distance, you can see the smoke from the fires that came after the earthquake

San Francisco’s fire-chief had been killed in the original earthquake. His hastily-organised replacement sent horse-drawn steam-powered pump-engines to the sites of as many fires as he could. But only then was the true nature of the disaster revealed.

The earthquake, apart from cutting out power, communications and gas-lines, had also ruptured the city’s water-mains! Taps, pumps and most importantly, fire-hydrants, were all bone-dry! Without any water on-hand to fight the growing fires, the blazes soon spread wildly out of control.

Martial Law and Disorder

The immediate aftermath of the earthquake left people dazed and scared. The world they knew, the world they lived in, socialised in, did business in, in some cases, the world which they grew up in, was suddenly wiped clean. In a world turned upside down, it was only a matter of time before there was a breakdown of law and order. With several unstable buildings around and the spreading fires, it was clear that something had to be done to preserve a sense of calm and order before riots, God forbid, broke out amongst civilians.

This painting shows the destruction of the city from the earthquake and fires. Here, soldiers help bring in food, clothing and other necessary supplies while others guard the supply-dump. Several privately-owned horses, carts, carriages and what few motor-cars there were, were all commandeered by the army or the police after the earthquake, to ferry important necessities into San Francisco

Soldiers from nearby garrisons were sent for and, in cooperation with San Francisco police-officers, US. Army soldiers patrolled the streets, aided the injured, searched for survivors and stood guard around important or unsafe structures to prevent people from entering them, either for purposes of looting, or for their own safety. The mayor declared martial law and instructed any and all soldiers, police-officers or other law-enforcement officers to shoot any persons found looting in the wreckage of damaged buildings. Several hundred people were shot for looting, although it’s theorised that several of these victims were actually home-owners trying to rescue their belongings and executed on the spot before they could offer an explanation for their actions.

This aerial shot of San Francisco was taken a few days after the disaster. It shows the sheer devastation of the fires and earthquake. The airplane having only recently been invented, this remarkable feat of photography was achieved with a camera and a kite!

Fighting the Fires

At most, the earthquake and aftershocks probably only lasted just over a minute, if that. The tremors caused widespread damage, downing power lines, cutting off telecommunications, rupturing gas and water lines, destroying streetcar lines and making roads impassable due to the rubble from collapsed or partially-collapsed buildings. Several famous structures, most notably, San Francisco’s City Hall (which, remarkably, stands to this day) were almost completely destroyed. Several of the city’s brand-new ‘earthquake and fireproof’ buildings (as they were billed as), mostly new skyscrapers, were all destroyed, either by the earthquake or the fires that followed.

Fighting the fires that resulted from the earthquake (due to ruptured gas-lines and sparking electrical wires) was a challenge, to say the least. The loss of running water to the city left the city’s firefighters with few options on how to combat the several infernos that were rapidly growing around the city. To try and at least contain the flames, firefighters, in cooperation with policemen and soldiers sent in to help with relief efforts, used dynamite and gunpowder from nearby army bases to blast their way across town. Buildings big, small, rich, poor, stately and slovenly were all dynamited indiscriminately in an effort to construct a containment line through the city to halt the spread of the fires. Many people had to be forcibly evicted from their houses that happened to be in the way of the dynamite’s path. Many fine, Victorian-style mansions and townhouses that lined San Francisco’s rich residential district…appropriately called “Nob Hill”…were blown to pieces in an effort to stop the fires’ advance. The lack of water meant that the fires burned for three days before they could finally be controlled.

In an amazing spate of mass-arson, several homeowners went about torching their homes, which probably contributed to the fires’ later ferocity. In San Francisco, buildings could, for rather obvious reasons, not be insured against earthquake damage. However, several of them were insured against fire damage. Citizens wanting to try and get some money out of the disaster deliberately set fire to their own houses to claim their fire-insurance payouts.

Search and Rescue

Immediately after the aftershocks, stunned and dazed San Franciscans, police-officers, doctors, firefighters and soldiers started raking through the rubble to try and dig out survivors. Massive refugee camps and field-hospitals were set up on the outskirts of San Francisco to house the homeless and to treat the wounded. Remarkable stories of madness, bravery and foolhardiness spouted from every mouth. One story told of a group of passers-by who ganged together when they heard shouts coming from a collapsed building. They removed some of the rubble and found a man under the wreckage. Efforts to remove the rest of the rubble were in vain, despite the concerted strength of the rescuers present and the man remained trapped to his waist in the rubble. The approaching fires caused many to run for their lives, leaving the man to his unhappy fate, while others continued to try and pry the man free. Pulling him was a waste of time, but they lacked the heavy-lifting equipment or any ropes or jacks to get the rest of the wreckage off of him. Finally, it all came to a head when the fire reached the collapsed building. The man became increasingly frantic, claiming he could feel the flames burning at his shoes, socks and trouser-legs. Desperate not to burn to death, he urged his would-be rescuers to keep trying. A policeman, one of the men at the scene, finally decided that it was hopeless. The man, terrified of his fate, begged to put to death. Rather than let the man burn to a crisp in full consciousness, the policeman took out his notebook, wrote down the man’s personal details and then shot him through the head with his service-revolver.

Furniture, clothing and personal belongings were not the only things that people ran out of their houses with or ran back to retrieve after the earthquake. One story tells of a waiter at San Francisco’s famous Palace Hotel. The earthquake had damaged the hotel’s refrigeration system and the waiter could be seen outside the gutted and quake-damaged structure, handing out free bottles of champagne to passers-by. He probably reasoned that nobody else would drink it anyway, so he might as well give it away.

While it survived the earthquake fairly undamaged, fires gutted the luxurious Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The Victorian-era facade was salvaged from the disaster and the hotel was rebuilt and reopened a few years later. It stands to this day as one of San Francisco’s finest hotels. Soldiers and policemen can be seen outside the flaming structure in this photograph taken after the earthquake

The Garden Court Tea Room in the restored Palace Hotel, as it appears today

Hot off the Presses

News of the San Francisco earthquake spread around the USA and around the world as fast as cables could take it. Within twenty-four hours, telephones were ringing off their hooks and telegraph lines were jammed with Morse Code messages telling the world of the disaster. Newspapers flashed the earthquake all over their front pages and petitions and notices for relief were sent out all over America. Donations of food, clothing and money for rebuilding flooded in.

“Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco in Ruins” this headline from Apr. 19th says. Below, smaller headlines read: “No Hope Left for Safety of Any Buildings”, “Blow Buildings up to Check Flames”, “Whole City is Ablaze”, “Church of St. Ignatius is Destroyed” and “Mayor Confers with Military and Citizens”

Rebuilding San Francisco

San Francisco had lasted where it was for sixty years before the earthquake happened, and damn it, it was going to last another sixty years. Reconstruction of the city was remarkably swift. By 1915, it was back on its feet again, despite the city looking like it had been hit by a nuclear bomb! Relief, charity and donations for the earthquake’s victims came in thick and fast. Over five million dollars (in 1906) was raised to help San Francisco and its citizens. Wealthy companies and America’s rich and famous of the early 20th century all donated phenomenal sums of money. Andrew Carnegie, for whom Carnegie Hall is named, donated the then staggering sum of $100,000. And he was just one of many people who sent in mindboggling donations to help the city rebuild. The US. Government alone sent in a million dollars, while entire cities and countries, from Canada to as far away as England, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in relief-funds.

The official death-toll from the earthquake stood at about 3,000 people. It was most likely a lot more than that, since some deaths probbaly went unreported. A lot of things changed after 1906. San Francisco’s famous cable-car system was much reduced, its Chinatown experienced a massive boom in population. The destruction of citizenship and immigration records during the earthquake created a delicious legal loophole for San Francisco’s oriental population, who all rapidly claimed American citizenship, allowing them to jump around the then in-effect “Asian Exclusion Act”, which allowed them to bring their families and relations to America to live with them. San Francisco’s bustling Chinatown remains the biggest in the USA to this day.

The famous Coit Tower was constructed after the earthquake, specially designed to be shaped like a fire-hose nozzle to commemorate the efforts of the firefighters who fought and died during the battle against the flames.

Coit Tower, San Francisco