Since the early 1900s Bell Telephone Laboratories, or Bell Labs, has been a major source of technological experimentation and change. Bell Labs has sponsored research far beyond the limits of its original focus, the telephone. From telephones to radar to c…
The first therapeutic uses of light (so called light therapy) date back to the end of the twentieth century, when a Danish researcher, Niels Ryberg Finsen, showed that light stimulates the immune defenses and enables the fight against infections. The treat…
Before video stores, movies were solely watched in theaters, leaving studios hesitant to embrace video technology and video stores because they feared for losses in revenues. The first VCRs hit the market in 1975, and shortly thereafter the video rental st…
Every war combatant highly appreciated the need for an unbreakable code that would help them communicate while protecting their operational plans. The U.S. Army knew where to find one: the Navajo Nation. Philip Johnston, a civil engineer for the city of Lo…
Let’s imagine that World War II wasn't about invading countries, killing people and achieving world domination. Instead, it was a fashion contest to create the most stylish military pictures. In other words - let’s think that the objective was for ordinary…
These spectacular postcards of France in the last years of the 19th century offer a rare glimpse of French cities in vibrant colors. They were created using the Photochrom process, a technique by which black-and-white photos were imbued with vibrant and li…
Helene Mayer, remains one of the Olympics’ great mysteries. She was, by definition of German law at the time, part-Jewish, which had cost her most of her citizenship rights. Her country’s press was forbidden to mention her name. Once she had been one of Ge…
Nowadays it's hard to believe that thousands of people would be willing to stand out in the cold for hours just to try a McDonald’s hamburger. But when the first McDonald’s arrived in Moscow in 1990, the whole city went mad. The Moscow McDonald’s initia…
The Great Kanto Earthquake, sometimes called the Great Tokyo Earthquake, rocked Japan on September 1, 1923. The city of Yokohama was hit even worse than Tokyo was, although both were devastated. It was the deadliest earthquake in Japanese history. The eart…
Born in 1907, Frida Kahlo lived for just 47 years. Andre Breton summed up Kahlo as “a ribbon around a bomb.” Here are some facts about the woman remembered as one of Mexico’s greatest artists. Kahlo lived most of her life in pain, the effect of contracting…
From the days of catapults and trebuchets, military men have dreamed of the ultimate weapon that could smash an enemy’s wall, castle, or defensive stronghold. For a span of eighty-five years, that weapon was the railroad gun, large enough to do substantial…
During the Second World War, the Soviet Union used more women in combat than any other country. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women sprang to join the war effort, enlisting as nurses, clerks, cooks, manufacturing etc. Among them were hundreds of remarkab…
Most of these rare and relatively intimate pictures of the Imperial Romanov family were taken by the head of the family and Russia's last tsar himself, Nicholas II. An insatiable photographer, the tsar took great care of his pictures, filing them carefully…
When President Truman moved into the executive mansion in 1945, they found the White House badly in need of repair after twelve years of neglect during the Depression and war. Floors groaned and creaked, winds blew in and out, strange sounds echoed in unus…
Though there were drive-ins as early as the 1910s, the first patented drive-in was opened on June 6, 1933 by Richard Hollingshead in New Jersey. It offered room for 400 vehicles. He created it as a solution for people unable to comfortably fit into smaller…
Cuba's reputation as an exotic and permissive playground came to light in the 1920s, when the country became a favorite destination for robber barons and bohemians. Hotels, restaurants, night clubs, golf clubs and casinos sprung up in Havana catering to th…
Disneyland was dedicated at an "International Press Preview" event held on Sunday, July 17, 1955, which was open only to invited guests and the media. Although 28,000 people attended the event, only about half of those were invitees, the rest having purcha…
These rare pictures depict the final days of 400 years of Turkish rule over Jerusalem. In its long history, the inhabitants and rulers of the city of Jerusalem have changed countless times, from ancient pagans to Biblical Israelites to Byzantine Christians…