The World in 1906 the year the ground shook twice

The earthquake and the fires that followed left about 225,000 people in San Francisco with nowhere to live, more than half the city. Four months later the port of Valparaiso in Chile was shaken down as well.

Life back then

A night out meant vaudeville: singers, jugglers, dog acts and a comedian, nine turns on one bill for a quarter. Cheaper still was the penny arcade, where a coin bought a peep at flickering photographs or a song piped through a listening tube. Music at home came from a phonograph that played wax cylinders, two minutes a time, cranked by hand between songs. The cylinders wore out fast and the sound was thin, but hearing a brass band in your own parlour was new.

The year in 8 events

• 🚢Feb 10 Britain launches HMS Dreadnought. Its big guns make every other battleship afloat look out of date.
• 🕯️Apr 18 An earthquake hits San Francisco before dawn. Fires burn for three days and most of the city is destroyed.
• 🍽️Jun 30 President Roosevelt signs the Pure Food and Drug Act after public anger about what went into food and medicine.
• 🗳️Jul 20 Finland gives women the vote and the right to stand for parliament, the first country in Europe to do both.
• 🕯️Aug 16 An earthquake wrecks Valparaiso, Chile's busiest port. Thousands are killed.
• ✊Sep 11 Indians packed into a Johannesburg theatre swear not to obey a new pass law. Gandhi's method of peaceful resistance starts here.
• 🛩️Oct 23 Alberto Santos-Dumont hops his boxy aeroplane off a field near Paris, the first such flight most Europeans accept as real.
• 🕌Dec 30 Muslim leaders meeting at Dacca found the All-India Muslim League.

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