A Blast From Our Past

Let the dashcam navel-gazing continue. As the story goes, Australia's National Film and Sound Archive dug up some camera footage in 2008 originally thought to hail from Hobart, Australia. A closer look revealed the images were actually of Vancouver, Canada. In 1907, Seattle filmmaker William Harbeck took his hand-cranked camera aboard one of the city's streetcars and began capturing life as viewed from the streets. The 106-year-old film shows bustling neighborhoods filled with pedestrians, stray dogs and men on bicycles all darting around town. The clip is an interesting glimpse at a life gone by, and predates the claimed oldest dashcam video we showed you before by an impressive 19 years (although obviously it's using a streetcar and not a conventional automobile).

Sadly, chronicler Harbeck met an untimely end. When he was 44 years old, he was commissioned to document the launch of a world-famous ocean liner, a ship that wound up on the bottom of the Atlantic. The name of the vessel? The Titanic. Take a look at Hartbeck's look at Vancouver below.

By Zach Bowman


The Old South Shore (America's Last Classic Interurban Railway)