Photos: The Great 1906 San Francisco Quake, Now in Living Color

1906 earthquake
Photographic History Collections / Smithsonian's National Museum of American History

Market Street, Flood Building
In the latter half of 1906, a few months after the disastrous 1906 earthquake hit the city of San Francisco, a photography innovator named Frederick Eugene Ives came to the city to record the tragedy. He saw the event as an opportunity to work with his new invention, the Ives Photochromoscope system, a device which produced an image its creator christened the Krömogram, a series of single-color plates which, when combined together and seen through a stereoscopic viewer (the Krömoscop!), created a 3-D color image.

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