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Today in History, April 18th

On April 18, 1906, a massive earthquake and fire wrecked San Francisco. Plus Paul Revere's ride and the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo.

By Today in History Updated November 10, 2026 3 min read Sources checked

Published April 18, 2026 · Last updated November 10, 2026

April 18 is best known as the day in 1906 when a massive earthquake and the fires that followed wrecked San Francisco. The date also saw Paul Revere’s midnight ride in 1775 and the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942.

The big story: The Great San Francisco Earthquake (1906)

At 5:13 in the morning on April 18, 1906, the San Andreas Fault slipped along a stretch roughly 275 miles long. The shock, later estimated at close to magnitude 8.0, was felt from southern Oregon down to Los Angeles. In San Francisco, buildings collapsed, but the shaking was only the first half of the disaster. Fires broke out right away, and broken water mains left firefighters with little to fight them. Crews and soldiers blew up whole blocks with dynamite to create firebreaks while aftershocks rolled through. Mayor E.E. Schmitz set a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Most of the fires were out by April 23. By then almost 30,000 buildings were gone, including most homes and nearly all of the central business district, and an estimated 3,000 people had died. The army ran more than 20 tent camps for refugees. That same day, April 23, the work of rebuilding the city began.

More events on April 18

Year	What happened
1506	Pope Julius II laid the first stone of the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
1689	Forces of the deposed King James II began a siege of the Protestant stronghold of Derry in Ireland (Old Style). The city held out for 105 days.
1775	Paul Revere and William Dawes rode out from Boston to warn that British troops were marching toward Concord. Fighting began at Lexington the next day.
1923	Yankee Stadium opened in the Bronx, and Babe Ruth christened it with a three-run home run.
1942	Lt. Col. James Doolittle led 16 B-25 bombers off the carrier USS Hornet in a surprise raid on Tokyo and other Japanese cities. Damage was light, but Allied morale soared.
1945	Ernie Pyle, America’s most popular war correspondent, was killed by Japanese machine-gun fire on the island of Ie Shima near Okinawa.
1955	Albert Einstein died in Princeton, New Jersey.
1956	American actress Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in a civil ceremony at the palace, becoming Princess Grace.
1980	Zimbabwe became independent from the United Kingdom.
1983	A suicide car bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans.
1999	Wayne Gretzky played his final NHL game.
2014	An avalanche on Mount Everest killed 16 Nepali mountain guides, most of them Sherpas, one of the deadliest accidents in the mountain’s history.

Born on April 18

1480: Lucrezia Borgia, Italian Renaissance noblewoman and daughter of the future Pope Alexander VI.
1857: Clarence Darrow, American defense lawyer famous for headline criminal trials and the Scopes trial.
1963: Conan O’Brien, American late-night talk-show host and comedian.