A horse-drawn wagon gallops through traffic
This single reel of unstaged, unedited footage was long misdated until a 2010 forensic analysis, matching visible car permit numbers and shadow angles, pinned its filming to April 14, 1906, four days before the earthquake and fire that destroyed the entire street shown on screen. It was added to the National Film Registry specifically because of that discovery: nearly everyone and everything caught on camera here was gone within the week. Nothing about the shot is staged; it's simply what Market Street looked like on an ordinary morning that turned out not to be ordinary at all.