A Crack in the Edge of the World (66 page)

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

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

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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.

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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.”

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The Geological Survey report noted that fully three-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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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My italics.

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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.

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Jennie Moore went on to become Seymour's wife.

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

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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.

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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.

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

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Father of Henry Cowell, the great American composer.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.