This film was shot on April 14, 1906, just four days before the San Francisco earthquake and fire, to which the negative was nearly lost. It was produced by moving picture photographers the Miles brothers: Harry, Herbert, Earle and Joe. Harry J. Miles hand-cranked the Bell & Howell camera which was placed on the front of a streetcar during filming on Market Street from 8th, in front of the Miles Studios, to the Ferry building. A few days later the Miles brothers were en route to New York when they heard news of the earthquake. They sent the negative to NY, and returned to San Francisco to discover that their studios were destroyed.

1906... Incredible. Cars were roaming the streets. Large buildings were standing. Hitler was decades away from taking power. Baseball was the only major sport in the country. There was no television. No real movie theaters as we know them. The Titanic hadn't yet set sail. The Great Depression was still over 20 years away. World War I hadn't happened yet. Women did not have the right to vote. Slavery was abolished just over 40 years prior. The first plane was flown for only a few miles just three years before. The World Wide Web was 84 years away from being invented. There were 78 million people in the USA, compared to about 335 million now. The first cell phone was nearly 70 years from invention.

It is now 2016 (pretty soon 2017), yet in the grand scheme of time, 1906 was only a split second ago.