Armed with his patents and financing from Crocker First National Bank in California he established a small laboratory in San Francisco on Green Street, at the foot of TelegraphHill.
Police said lorries had been "stacked" at the bottom of Haldon Hill on the A38 and TelegraphHill on the A380 while gritters and snow ploughs "went to work".
My grandfather, born in San Francisco in 1892, was a 13-year-old boy living on TelegraphHill in San Francisco with his sister, three brothers and parents at the time of the earthquake.
Wild parrots cheer on walkers who climb the Greenwich Steps to Coit Tower (1 TelegraphHill Blvd), lined with government-sponsored 1930s murals that subversively celebrate the city's radical politics and capped with giddy 360-degree views of the Bay.
Martin divides his time between a Gold Rush-era house atop San Francisco's TelegraphHill, where the theme is the Wild West (racks of Colts and Winchesters, plus an 1880s roulette table with scrimshawed ivory chips), and a country house in the Napa Valley town of Rutherford.