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Aerial Photographs of the 1906 Earthquake
hansoloaf writes "In 1906 San Francisco had a devastating earthquake - registering around 7.7 to 8.3 on the Richter scale. George Lawrence had devised ways to take aerial photographs and went to SF to showcase his technology. He used kites and custom built cameras that could take photos while up in the air."
wtf?
2nd post and the sites going down fast..
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I suppose this may be fascinating for some people, but how does something published in 1989 count as news? And how does it relate to computers and/or technology? Kites are hardly groundbreaking, especially ones from 1906.
And people thought Phillip Torrone was ahead of the times :-)
When I lived in SF, all the natives (hard to find) referred to that quake as "The Fire". Because the ensuing fire destroyed more of the city than did the quake. Because (as was revealed in early 1990s research) when the city started to burn, the wily (don't call them) Friscans torched all their own buildings. To collect the insurance money in a huge suck off the insurance companies to the East. Since the oldest buildings had been built only a couple of generations prior, and most had been built in the prior generation, they cashed in and wiped Victorian architecture to the sand. SF is charming, and mostly harmless, but don't turn your back, or you'll get the suckerpunch.
--
make install -not war
slow day?
what happened to interesting, current stories?
News For Nineteen-Oh-Six maybe... but news has to be, um, recent, and for that matter, usually previously unreported. Surely this fits neither category.
Here is the Google cache view of the 2004 slashdot effect on rtpnet.org servers. Notice the missing pictures - sign of destruction this natural disaster left in its path.
[alk]
It should also show you that there have always been nerds.
... ok, have fun, you deserve it."
/.
Hang in there, guys. One day you'll do something cool like take a picture of total devastation.
You'll be famous for 15 minutes, chicks will be drawn, you'll be tricked into marrying one, and then years later when she asks if you'd mind if she went out with her friends from work you can say, "Well
Then you can be like me, free at last to read
sigs, as if you care.
Another place to look for media about the quake/fire is the Internet Archive. If you go to the Prelinger Archives of the video section and search for "San Francisco Fire" the first two entries are videos of Market Street before and after it happened. Or, since the average Slashdotter and Slashdaughter are lazy, here are the search results.
I propose that Slashdot Scale = 1 / (time it takes after post for server to explode)
This article first appeared in the Landscape magazine, Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 1989. And the event the article was about was almost a century ago!
that must have been the fastest slashdotting in history. They must be running a steam-powered server.
"Nobody reads /. for the articles, just the comments!"
/. to start using Coral and FreeCache?
:(
So how are you supposed to comment on a site which gets Slashdotted in seconds? Is it too much to ask for both readers and the people who get their sites totalled for
Dag, yo.
last week they had the same link... *Really* stretching it topic-wise
He's been trying to figure out a way to link to Engadget all day!
Next stop: Roland's blog...
Aww, come one. Kite aerial photography. There's been links about that on Slashdot before. That link talks about events which happened 98 years ago!
;)
I know Slashdot sometimes report on old news or dupe, but that's ridiculous.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
http://slushdot.org/mirror/earthquake/landscape.ht ml
There was a big fire that torched most of the city, and some of it was intentionally set, but most of it was caused by the quake itself (wooden buildings, fire/candles/oil-lamps as primary heat and light source, etc.) There was no conspiracy to bilk those big eastern banking interests, and since this was 1906 I would point out that _all_ current architecture was Victorian. In fact, because of the fact that the entire city was basically re-built in 1907 it probably has the largest collection of Victorian buildings left in the US.
The efforts made to stop the fire, using fire fighting technology that was "primitive" at best, were truly herculean. The cause was not helped by the fact that the earthquake had also destroyed most of the water mains and distribution infrastructure. [A couple of blocks from where I used to live there was a fireplug with a big brass plaque next to it that declared that particular plug to be the only one in the city that did not lose pressure during the firefighting effort after the quake (20th & Church next to Delores Park for locals)]
What eventually stopped the fire was a decision by the authorities to create a major firebreak by essentially blowing up a 1 block wide path down Van Ness Ave.
"In 1906 San Francisco had a devastating earthquake... George Lawrence had devised ways to take aerial photographs... He used kites and custom built cameras that could take photos while up in the air."
BFD. So kite flying cameras have been around for centuries. Where's the "News for Nerds" factor?
So you're buying into the official con job that lasted almost a century, as the study to which I referred revealed. Thanks for chiming in! And though I did remark on the timeframe in which the sacrificed contemporary Victorian buildings lived their short lives, I will note that Victoria died in 1901; the period of 1901-1910 is known as "Edwardian" after her successor. Of course, SF has long had a taste for retro styles, so continued to build Victorian style buildings. I didn't say that *all* the Victorians burned, or that they weren't replaced. Even people who never lived in SF know that. Keep snappin'!
--
make install -not war
a camera on a kite? isn't that asking for trouble? Wouldn't a hot air baloon be a lot more stable?
Less than three weeks before, the earth had shaken and the city had burned.
Nowadays we'd have aerial photography as the earthquake was occuring! Apparently it took three weeks or so to travel from New York to San Fran way back in 1906. That's nutty. Just goes to show you how far we've come in 100 years and how spoiled we've all become.
What is your penile percentile?
So please, stop griping at every article that the sites are slashdotted with few or no comments. It's just the way it is.
(Not aimed at you, personally)
Kites are hardly groundbreaking
Hard ground, on the other hand, is often kitebreaking.
100 years later, the quake is still causing damage (in this case to webservers...)
But I dow ww.rtpnet.org/robroy/lawrence/landscape.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20040308085913/http://
pof.
I recall seeing posts here complaining about Slashdot being a month or a year behind the news, but almost a century? That's gold. They must be really desperate for news.
This just in: I brushed my teeth.
Sam ty sig.
Only 3 weeks was awesome and they were glad to have it. Just 54-60 years before was the California Gold Rush when the travel time was a lot longer. If you went by land it was 5-6 months IF you arrived at all. Lots of people died along the trail. If you went by sea it was more like 1-3 months IF you lived. Lots of people died of disease by crossing Panama on foot or were lost sailing all the way around South America.
Nowdays, people get pissy when their four hour flight gets delayed for an hour because of bad weather. People don't really realize how much and in how short a time things have changed in this world. There are people alive who can tell you about the 1906 earthquake and fire because they were there. The last of the civil-war widows only died a year or two ago.
People talk about "Ancient History" but it really wasn't all that long ago.
Available at the Library of Congress website.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Don't know if it's a hoax, but I thought it pretty interesting.
Too late. The images are tanked already!
Laugh, it's good for you!
...I want his Time-Travel tech!
Ok, I assume that he took pics of the damage from the quake? I can't see the second link because it has been
But seriously, this seems like a random front page story. I almost think that I could make any article I wanted about kite photography and get it posted. There have been so many kite stories lately...I'm too lazy to post links to them all. But a quick search in old stories turns up at least 5 since July.
I think I know enough about kites now, can't we do something new and exciting? Maybe home-made submarine cams or something?
Image Google Mirror
My city: Barcelona.
Ummm...kites have been around for centuries, but cameras have been around since 1825. rj
Those who do not know history are doomed to believe in supra-luminal alien interference and chariots of the future-gods.
In short, it's documentary and I frankly doubt you know of it. Deal with it!
News for nerds? Yes. Stuff that matters? Hell, yes.
Hasn't he done enough damage already to warrant a trip to Guantanamo or something? I mean, every time I hear anything about an earthquake, his name is mentioned.
Something has to be done.
-Bush
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I sat here, looking at the front page of slashdot. I read this summary. And I knew, knew without a doubt, that some fuckhead with a high userid would say "How is this news" before anyone posted any actual useful comments.
This is Slashdot's equivalent of a fluff story. It sure as hell beats the nightly network complement of kittens rescued from wells. It lets us talk about something other than the old SCO, Patents, Microsoft, Privacy brigade that are mostly posted on here. It's just a break, and it only took you thirty seconds to read the summary.
Contrary to popular belief, there's no shortage of pixel statechanges in the world. We don't need constant commentary on whether it was worth linking this thing or that thing.
When I click the "older articles" link at the bottom of the page, I am greeted with "Nothing to see here, please move along." I am stumped...
But for twenty cents on the dollar you mean to hang around and make sure, even if it gets you killed.
($175 million in claims were filed, most likely paid through re-insurance in London.)
If I was being anal I'd correct you by saying that it was actually 1827... and if I was being a bastard, I'd bring up the fact that aristotle was busy inventing the camera obscura way back in 330BC... but I'm not, so I won't.
Nowdays, people get pissy when their four hour flight gets delayed for an hour because of bad weather. People don't really realize how much and in how short a time things have changed in this world.
I think people realize this just fine. The reason people get pissy when their flight gets delayed by an hour is because they were TOLD that it wouldn't take that long, and so they PLANNED on it not. Just an observation.
All you guys pissing about with "this is old" or "so what" are missing the point...this was innovation and the photos are quite unique considering the time period. Check out the design on the kites. Don't be such 4th graders...oh, wait. This is slashdot--you probably are 4th graders.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
From your post it seems you think so.
So he had a series of 12 kites that he used to lift his giant camera upto 2000 feet in the air. Very cool. Read the article.
i think it was on the discovery channel that i heard this
San Francisco was built mainly on filled up marsh. the 1909 quake shook up the filling which made them settle, collapsing/burying the buildings built on it. later in order to stop land values dropping from the effects of the quake they focused attention on the fire..
of course i could be wrong
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
In fact, because of the fact that the entire city was basically re-built in 1907 it probably has the largest collection of Victorian buildings left in the US.
IIRC, AFAIK, etc. Queen Vicky was pushing daisies at that point, and the architecture that followed on and was rampant throughout was known as Edwardian, after her boy King Edward.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
New Madrid eathquake of 1811-1812
3 times larger than the 64 AK quake and 10 times larger than the 1906 quake...
The fact was that quake damage was not covered by insurance. Fire damage was. If your property had been destroyed in the quake you got none. If it had survived the quake but been later destroyed in the fire resulting from the quake you got your money back.
So their was a very large scale fraud. Including doctoring evidence like photographs AND messing with the death toll.
I am afraid you are getting your evidence from what the authorities of the time wanted you to believe. It is an amazing story really but the evidence is clear. These arial photos just prove it more. Just compare them with some of the other "official" photographs of the time. Buildings they show standing are gone here.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
san fran in ruins 1906
Yeah yeah... I know PDF... guit yer bitchen at least you get to see something...
Houses that burned down were made out of redwood trees...they were native to SF. Now if you KNEW there were no more huge redwood trees available locally to rebuild your house or mansion, would you still burn it down? What would you use to rebuild your house with? Pine is piece of crap that warps, rots and is basically no good.
Jim McCoy is 100% correct - they dynamited houses on Van Ness to prevent the spread of fire.
That's why it's so wide and there are hundreds of Victorian houses on other side that survived.
It must have been horrible to be so close to water and not be able to use it because of broken pipes.
Of course, take note of the fact that that last "Civil War Widow" was born in 1906...
And her civil war vet husband was 81 when she married him at age 21... So although it is true that she does qualify as a civil war widow, she was born more than forty years after the end of the war...
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The Japanese have invaded Pearl Harbour.
Your source for your crazy claim is Some Dude on Some Website? What next, you'll tell us the holocast never happened and the moon landings were a fake?
Obligatory Onion quotes:
"Earth-Quake Marks Least Gay Day in San Francisco History"
"'Queen City on the Pacific' Lies in Ruins."
"Garment District Still Flaming."
A little narrative to go with your pictures -- check out this gripping account of this very earthquake by author Jack London (of Call Of The Wild fame).
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
Yeah, yeah, we all know how arduous the trip to the West Coast was during the gold rush years. We lived through the whole thing ourselves! Many many times on those Apple II machines so many years ago...
While this is cool technology indeed, it is not new. Slashdot's adage is "news for nerds, stuff that matters". I am personally very interested in the history of mathematics, science and engineering. But it is not to feed that interest that I visit slashdot. Thousands of other cool historical things exist: invention of motion picture, the television, important physics experiments, the discovery of physical laws...
all of them interesting and cool, but not new.
Now if these pictures would have been found back after being missing since 1907, or if someone had done processing of them, and had discovered something special, this would qualify as news. Now it's just one of thousands of cool things, and I understand why people complain.
Z
You would too for free ram. [pctech4free.com]
Actually, no, I wouldn't. Notice how there is no ponzi scheme in my sig.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
AC:
Grow some balls and get a lawyer if things are really that bad at your place of employment.
Otherwise, STFU. You sound like a real crybaby. "Waaaa! Someone is giving me the evil eye because I am a contractor."
Thanks,
-Scott
Pics of the SF earthquake - this must have been quite the news flash -98 YEARS AGO. Sort of the ultimate repeat post. If there was a slashdot back then, I'm sure this would have made it as a story.
These pictures (both the perspective and the devistation) remind me a lot of the big panoramic picture that they have on the wall of the atomic bomb museum at Peace Park in Hiroshima. Except I imagine the pictures in Hiroshima were taken from an airplane rather than a kite.
Am I the only one who finds it blackly humorous and more than a little creepy that one of the few buildings remaining standing in the first picture is the California Casket Company??
Me? Debunk an American myth? And take my life in my hands?
It took a lot less than an earthquake to burn down the city of Baltimore on February 7,1904. Although the fire's exact origins are unknown, it is suspected that a dropped match or cigarette fell through a broken basement skylight window on a sidewalk adjoining the Hurst Building, located near the present First Mariner Arena. The fire probably smoldered for a while, then caught on some stored gasoline for a stationary engine in the Hurst Building. Within minutes of the initial alarm, the entire building was involved. Within an hour, the fire caused an explosion which caused the roof to blow off, spreading embers over adjoining and nearby buidings. A general alarm was sounded, and firefighters were dispatched from Washington DC to join the effort. When DC's firefighters arrived by express train at 1:30 PM, they discovered that their hose couplings didn't fit Baltimore's hydrants. Efforts to kludge connections with canvas were fruitless.
Fanned by 25 MPH winds from the southwest, the fire quickly spread North and east, reaching as far north as Lexington Street. It was decided to try to form a firebreak by dynamiting buildings along Charles Street. Buildings shook, windows blew out, and new fires were started, but most dynamited buildings stood. This only accelerated the spread of the fire.
At 8 PM, the winds shifted to and increased out of the southwest, causing the fire to spread South toward Pratt Street. Firefighters efforts and the shift in wind let City Hall and the Federal Courthouse narrowly escape the flames. The firefighters were able to keep the fire from spreading into Federal Hill and tried to save the Waterfront, but the piers in the inner harbor were lost at about 6 AM. Reinforcements arrived from as far away as New York City and Altoona, PA in the early morning hours.
With the docks lost and the fire threatening the densely populated Fells Point and Little Italy neighborhoods to the east, a fireline of 37 fire engines, assisted by the city's fireboat and tugs was established along a narrow waterway known as the Jones Falls. Some small fires started on the east side of the Jones Falls, but were quickly extinguished, and by 5 PM Monday, the fire was declared under control, though it smoldered for weeks.
In all, 140 acres of the downtown business district were burned to the ground, as well as all of the wharves along Pratt Street. Only 1 man was burned to death, but 5 firemen later died of pneumonia as a result of smoke and exposure. 35,000 people were thrown out of work in the dead of winter, and 2,500 businesses were burned out.
Baltimore soon rebuilt and reshaped, but the fire's legacy remains to this day.
The Bibliotheque National in Paris has a photograph made in 1825, and I'll have to render a verdict of anal on the camera obscura -- since it requires a human operator inside with a paintbrush. "Camera" has one meaning in Latin and another in English.
rj
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blpho tography.htm
Note the bit that says "On a summer day in 1827, it took eight hours for Joseph Nicéphore Niépce to obtain the first fixed image."
OK...
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Article3161.html
rj
I stand corrected =P
I never realized how devestating the earthquake and fire were. It is sad to think of all of those tragic deaths. I only hope history does not repeat itself.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING!
Wait...
Exactly how big is that?
I almost forgot, if it hadn't been for you.
Smoke 'em if you have 'em!
When I hear the term "Civil War Widow" it means to me a woman whose husband was lost due to the war - and, as such, was made a widow by the war.
This woman born in 1906 doesn't count, by that standard.
± 29 dB
Actually, I tend to agree with both of you. The term "Civil War Widow" came from the US Government because they were still being paid pensions from their husbands' civil war service. Confederate soldiers exempted of course, although I believe many of the Confederate Civil War Widows received a stipend from "Southern Charitable Organizations" for the equivalent.
Sounds like gaming the system, if you ask me.