A Crack in the Edge of the World (60 page)

Sweet Nell of Old Drury
(play), 238

Système International d'Unités, 78

Taft, William Howard, 310–11

Taiping Rebellion, 219

Taiwan earthquake of 1906, 26

Tangrenbu.
See
Chinatown

technology of United States in 1906, 50–52

tectonic plates, 57–62, 416.
See also
faults; North American Plate; Pacific Plate; plate tectonics

Tecumseh, 99

Tejon Pass (California) earthquake, 191–94

Telegraph Creek, California, 169

Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, 228, 294

telegraph lines, 124, 128, 287, 315

telephone exchanges, 287, 297

tents, 210, 313

terrane (term), 155, 416–17

Tertiary Period, 415

Tethys, 74

Texas, 111, 133–34

theaters, 238

Thingvellir, Iceland, 67–68

thixotropic (term), 417

Thomas, Lewis, 3–4

Three Years in California
(book), 116

Tibet, 39

Tiffany, Charles, 141–42

time scale, geological, 401–3

timing of Great San Francisco Earthquake, 12–18, 253, 267–71

Todd, James, 142.
See also
King, Clarence

Tok, Yukon, 377

tongs, Chinese, 222.

trails to California, 124–25

transcontinental railroads, 124, 128.
See also
railroads and railroad companies

transform faults, 60–61

Transverse Ranges, 191, 194–95

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 114–15

Temblor Range, 188–89, 194

triode invention, 51

triple junctions, San Andreas Fault, 167–69

tsunamis

Alaskan, of 1964, 371

measuring, 387

riverine, 412

Sumatran, of 2004, 28, 365 (
see also
Sumatran earthquake and tsunami of 2004)

Tumaco, Colombia, 24

Turner, Thomas, 89

Twain, Mark, 34

2004 (year), seismic events of, 28.
See also
Sumatran earthquake and tsunami of 2004

Two Years Before the Mast
(book), 116, 204

Ukiah, California, 270

umbo (term), 417

Union Square, San Francisco, 216

United States

acquisition of California by, 113–15

Army Corp of Engineers and Alaska Highway, 374

Congress, President James Polk, and Great Western Surveys, 137–38 (
see also
Great Western Surveys)

Congressional response to Great San Francisco Earthquake, 310–11

Congressional response to insurance company behavior, 328–29

earthquakes in, 95, 109 (
see also
earthquakes)

Geological Survey (
see
U. S. Geological Survey)

government (
see
government, federal)

insurance companies in, 329

military response, 304–13 (
see also
military)

Mint, 207, 286–87, 311, 315, 316

Navy, 312

Post Office, 314–16

EarthScope, SAFOD project, and, 185–87

San Francisco's supremacy and President Teddy Roosevelt, 53–54

science, technology, politics, and culture of, in 1906, 49–56

Weather Bureau, 253

U. S. Geological Survey

earthquake forecasts, 362–63

Clarence King and, 140, 142

John Wesley Powell and, 148

reports on Great San Francisco Earthquake, 280–81, 284–85, 286, 291

SAFOD project and, 185–87

University of California, 14, 18, 149

uplift, San Andreas Fault, 194–95

Ur, 79, 82

urban planning efforts, 229–30, 356–59

Valle de San Andreas, 164

Vallejo, California, 128

Valparaiso earthquake of 1906, 27–28

Vancouver, George, 116

Van Dyke, W. S., 292

velocity, earthquake wave, 398

Vesuvius eruption of 1906, 26–27, 229–30, 234

vibration detectors, 263.l
See also
seismographs

vigilantism, 129, 213

Vigne, Jean-Louis, 116

Vincent Fault, 196

Vincenti-Konkoly Vertical Pendulum, 263–64

volcanic earthquakes, 25

volcanic layered rock, 71–73

volcanoes.
See also
seismic events

animals and, 240

Iceland's, 66

measuring, 387–88

Mount Diablo mistaken for, 38–39

Mount Shasta, 45, 372

Pacific Plate and, 372

plate tectonics and, 59, 60–61, 85–86

predicting, 365

subduction, and, 165–66, 169

Vesuvius eruption of 1906, 26–27, 229–30, 234

Yellowstone National Park and, 380–85

Von Rebeur-Paschwitz Horizontal Pendulum, 264

vulnerability

building construction, 390, 391–96

San Francisco's, 47–48

Wadati, Kiyoo, 396

wagons

Conestoga, 118, 413

latrine-emptying, 313

Walker's Continental Divide Road-house, 375

Wallace, Robert, 189–91

Wall Street crash of 1929, 321

Wal-Mart (company), 375–76

Walsh, Harry, 248–49

Walsh, William, 323

Wapakoneta, Ohio, 1–3

Wappingers Falls Sequence of 1974, 87–88, 95

Washington Street, San Francisco, 243–45

water supply

damage to, 289–90, 361

establishment of, 210, 214

firefighting and poor condition of, 229, 239, 320

restoring, 313

Watson Lake, British Columbia, 375

waves, earthquake, 175–76, 390, 398–99

weather, pre-earthquake, 231.
See also
wind

Weather Bureau

San Francisco, 14, 16–17

United States, 253

weathercock, earthquake, 261–62

Wegener, Alfred, 69–70, 73–74

Wellington
(ship), 252

Wells Fargo Building, 286

Wells Fargo routes, 124

Wesley, John, 337, 342

West, American.
See
Great Western Surveys

What Cheer House, 216–17

Wheeler, George, 143

Wheeler Survey, 143

Whitehorse, Yukon, 375–76

whorehouses, 209, 224

Wilde, Oscar, 351

Willows Garden, 216

Wilson, C. E., 314

Wilson, J. Tuzo, 8–11, 416

wind

fires and, 239–40, 293, 299–300

measuring, 387

Windward Islands, 25

Winnemucca, Nevada, 258

Winslow, Arizona, meteor crater, 134–36

Wood, H. O., 400

wooden buildings, 257, 282

Woodward, Robert, 216–17

Woodward's Gardens, 216–17

Woolworth building, 51–52

Works Progress Administration, 355

World Pentecostal Movement, 335–42

World Trade Center attacks, 325–26

Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 51

writers, 225, 351–56

xenolalia (term), 337–38

Xujiahui, China, 264–65

Yellowstone National Park, 139, 380–85

Yerba Buena Island, 215, 254

Yerba Buena name for San Francisco, 46, 201–6

Yosemite National Park, 129

Young, King, 233

Yucatán Chicxulub meteor crater, 415

Yukon

Alaska Highway in, 375–76

diamond deposits in, 85

Zikawei, China, 264–65

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for the use of the illustrations and data that appear in this book: Page 100: State Historical Society of Missouri. Page 107: Cynthia Yow. Pages 168, 183: Fault lines from California Geologic Survey,
Digital Database of Faults from the Fault Activity Map of California and Adjacent Areas
. Page 173: Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Page 262: illustrations by Laura Hartman Maestro.

Insights, Interviews & More …

About the author

Meet Simon Winchester

About the book

A Conversation with Simon Winchester

Read on

Before the Flood

Have You Read? More by Simon Winchester

“During the Falklands War, Winchester was arrested and spent three months in prison in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, on spying charges.”

A
UTHOR, JOURNALIST, AND BROADCASTER
Simon Winchester has worked as a foreign correspondent for most of his career. Before joining his first newspaper in 1967, however, he graduated from Oxford with a degree in geology and spent a year working as a geologist in the Ruwenzori Mountains in western Uganda and on oil rigs in the North Sea.

His journalistic work, mainly for the
Guardian
and the
Sunday Times
, has seen him based in Belfast; Washington,
D.C.
; New Delhi; New York; London; and Hong Kong, where he covered such stories as the Ulster crisis, the creation of Bangladesh, the fall of President Marcos, the Watergate affair, the Jonestown Massacre, the assassination of Egypt's President Sadat, the death and cremation of Pol Pot, and the 1982 Falklands War. During the Falklands conflict he was arrested and spent three months in prison in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, on spying charges. Winchester has been a freelance writer since 1987.

He now works principally as an author, although he contributes to a number of
American and British magazines and journals, including
Harper's, Smithsonian, National Geographic
, the
Spectator, Granta
, the
New York Times
, and the
Atlantic Monthly
. He was appointed Asia-Pacific editor of
Condé Nast Traveler
at its inception in 1987, and later became editor-at-large. His writing has won him several awards, including British Journalist of the Year.

He writes and presents television films on a variety of historical topics—including a series on the final years of colonial Hong Kong—and is a frequent contributor to the BBC radio program
From Our Own Correspondent
. Winchester also lectures widely—most recently before London's Royal Geographical Society (of which he is a Fellow) and to audiences aboard the cruise liners
QE2
and
Seabourn Pride
.

His books cover a wide range of subjects: the remnants of the British Empire; the colonial architecture of India; aristocracy; the American Midwest; his months in an Argentine prison on spying charges; his description of a six-month walk through the Korean Peninsula; and the Pacific Ocean and the future of China. More recently he has written
The River at the Center of the World
, about China's Yangtze River; the best-selling
The Professor and the Madman
, which is to be made into a major motion picture by distinguished French director Luc Besson;
The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans
, which recounts his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 Kosovo crisis; and the bestselling
The Map That Changed the World
, about the nineteenth-century geologist William Smith. His latest books,
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883
(April 2003) and
A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
(October 2005), have both been
New York Times
bestsellers and appeared on numerous best of and notable lists.

Simon Winchester lives in New York City and has a small farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Mr. Winchester was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty The Queen in 2006. He received the honor in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

“Mr. Winchester was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty The Queen in 2006.”

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www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

The following interview was conducted in July 2005
.

Your last book was about the explosion of the Krakatoa volcano in the late nineteenth century. Before that you wrote about William Smith and the geological “map that changed the world.” Should we see a connection between these books and your new one?