The sternwheeler Telegraph floats beside the Colman Dock clock tower only weeks or days before the one was sunk and the other toppled over. In the mid-1960s the contemporary Colman Dock was constructed and its staging area for vehicles completed over the slip shown in the historical view.

Here, the Telegraph is perhaps heading out for Bremerton, a regular destination since 1910, the year it was sold to the Puget Sound Navigation Co. It was no more than a few weeks later, on the evening of April 25, 1912, that the tower and the sternwheeler shared the same fate.

On that night, while Capt. John "Dynamite" O'Brien was preparing to land his ocean-going steamer Alameda at the Alaska Steamship Company's pier just south of the Colman Dock, he was waved off to the north side. He instructed his assistant Robert Bunton to go "full speed astern," but Bunton instead went full speed ahead. Like a hot knife through butter and with hardly a scratch to its steel hull, the Alameda drove through the outer end of Colman Dock. Before it was stopped by its own anchor, the 3,158-ton Alameda dropped the tower into the bay and drove the Telegraph — parked then, as here, along the pier's north side — as far as the Grand Pacific Dock before it sank the sternwheeler.

Remarkably, no one was killed. And, aside from a few scratches and brief dunkings, no one was hurt. Without tragedy this collision soon became a cartoon in the retelling. After the owners of the Telegraph instructed the owners of the Alameda to pay them $55,000 in damages, a federal court made them settle for $25,000 on the grounds that sternwheelers were no longer popular. Still, the Telegraph was raised and repaired. The tower was also replaced.

Paul Dorpat specializes in historical photography and has published several books on early Seattle.