This is both fascinating and frightening.

For some time archivists have had a film made in San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake. Most experts had dated the film to September or October 1905. But a film historian did a little more checking. He noticed rain puddles on the ground but the fall of 1905 was dry. He also checked the license plates on some of the cars in the film and found they were not registered until January or February 1906.

Doing some more research he found that March 1906 was wet, so now he had dated the film to sometime in April 1906. A check of newspaper records found an ad for the film which set it in early April 1906. New research has now confirmed that this movie was made around April 14th, 1906 just 4 days before the big quake.

Every building in this film was destroyed in the quake and the sad odds are many of those in the film died in the disaster.

An amazing bit of history

Here is the film

Here is a 60 minutes story on the researcher.