The Great Alaska Earthquake, as it would become known, was the most powerful earthquake ever measured at the time, and remains the second most powerful one to date. Its magnitude would be measured at 9.2; its epicenter was 75 miles east of Anchorage, and shallow: only about fifteen and a half miles underground. For thousands of years, the Pacific Plate had been crunching its way under the opposing edge of the North American Plate—lurching at a low angle, and slowly, about two or two and a half inches every year. Cyclically, over time, an unsustainable amount of pressure would build up, then suddenly release. This was one of those moments; the plates slipped—hard.
One seismologist would later explain that the earthquake was so violent it “made the earth ring like a bell.” Its energy seemed to reverberate everywhere, disrupting or reshaping the surface of the planet as it went. An uninhabited island southeast of Anchorage was knocked nearly seventy feet out of its original position. Most of the landmass of North America momentarily jostled upward, in some places by as much as two inches. The quake shook the water in wells around the world, tripping gauges in more than seven hundred far-flung locations, including Puerto Rico, England, Belgium, Libya, and Israel. (“Water levels in wells as far away as South Africa jumped abruptly,” a National Academy of Sciences report would note.) In Baton Rouge, a homeowner noticed his swimming pool jiggle.
Twenty-three hundred miles south of Anchorage, in an elegant, modernist ranch home in Pasadena, California, a 63-year-old man and his wife were settling down in their living room with cocktails. The man was an odd duck—a rumpled intellectual and avid nudist who wrote many abjectly bad love poems about women who were not his wife. But he was also an accomplished seismologist—he’d developed the scale on which the magnitude of earthquakes is measured—and was passionate and single-minded enough about his work to have installed a seismograph in his living room. The machine was cumbersome and ugly, mounted on its own cabinet and topped by a large metallic tumbler. He’d wedged the device between a grandfather clock and a stylishly upholstered club chair.
The man’s wife hated the seismograph—she initially regarded it as “a rather brutally coarse intrusion among her neat furnishings,” he wrote. He insisted that she had come to appreciate having this apparatus in her living room—but, really, who knows: the man was not necessarily someone whose sensitivity to the emotions of others should be trusted.
Now, at 7:42 pm—5:42 pm Anchorage time—as they sat together, listening to a concert on the radio, the man looked over and saw the seismograph’s needle jerking.
“There’s a great earthquake recording,” Charles Richter remarked to his wife.
“Yes?” Lillian Richter replied sleepily. He was talking over the concert.