Not many people know that the famous American author Jack London was also a skilled documentary photographer and photojournalist. He took thousands of pictures over the years from the slums of London’s East End to the islands of the South Pacific. In…
For thousands of years, humans could only speculate what the Earth looked like. This changed on August 23, 1966, when the world received its first view of Earth taken by a spacecraft from the vicinity of the Moon. The photo was shot from a distance of a…
Dubbed by the media as the “world’s largest log cabin,” (actually, second largest), the Forestry Building was constructed as part of Portland’s Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905. The cabin was an enormous structure, measuring 206 feet long (…
These amazing vintage photos show what it was like to go holiday shopping in New York City in the 1910s. At the turn of the century, department stores in NYC amped up window displays in an attempt to charm window shoppers into actually coming into the store…
All NASA astronaut groups were given a series of survival courses to prepare them for expected landings in remote, inhospitable areas. The objective of preparing the crews this way was to give them confidence and the ability to deal with an emergency or…
During the era of silent film, recommendations for behavior were displayed on title cards before a screening, offering advice including "Ladies, kindly remove your hats", "Loud talking or whistling not allowed", "Please applaud with hands only", etc. The Li…
The only thing as impressive as the Empire State Building are the men who built it and during that time rules for construction workers were a lot laxer than they are today. The hardworking men way up high who were moving girders, riveting, painting, and eve…
Starting in 1897 and continuing through 1930, the hilly topography of central Seattle was radically altered by a series of regrades, in what might have been the largest such alteration of urban terrain at the time. The regrading strategy was adopted for…
Every decade has a reputation and leaves a legacy for future generations. The 1950s were cool because of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, classy cars, and the economic boom. The 1960s had counter-cultural stuff with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and, obviously, a…
Tina Turner (born November 26, 1939, Brownsville, Tennessee, U.S.), was an American-born singer who found success in the rhythm-and-blues, soul, and rock genres in a career that spanned five decades. Widely referred to as the "Queen of Rock 'n' Roll", she r…
The subcultures in the Soviet Union, a country cut off from the West by the infamous Iron Curtain, were a form of open youth rebellion against ideological and cultural stagnation. Stilyagi, goths, hippies, bikers, punks, rockers, and metalheads formed c…
These are the offices of the Central Social Institution of Prague (Czechoslovakia back then) in 1937 and it contained the largest vertical letter file cabinets in the world. The office consists of cabinets arranged from floor to ceiling tiers covering over …
When Citroën Karin was first presented at the Paris Motor Show in 1980, it couldn’t help but attract the astonished gaze of visitors. It was quite unusual to see a futuristic sci-fi pyramid in a motor show, let alone a pyramid on four wheels. Its name begin…
These stunning color postcards of Tunisia show its vibrant streets, spectacular architecture, and the everyday life of Tunisian people. Produced in 1899, the postcards were printed using the popular Photochrom technique invented by a Swiss printer in th…
These stunning photographs of car wrecks in the 1930s were captured by Leslie Jones, a famous photographer who worked for the Boston Herald-Traveler from 1917 to 1956. Jones documented daily life in Boston and surrounding areas and some 40,000 of his negati…
A NASA tech briefing "Using Spider-Web Patterns To Determine Toxicity" was published in April 1995. The work was done by researchers at Marshall Space Flight Center to see how various substances — including caffeine — affect spider web patterns. Accordi…
In addition to developing the telephone, the Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell did extensive research in aerodynamics. This series of photographs depict Bell and his colleagues demonstrating and testing out a number of different kite designs,…
Ralph Madsen, known as the Tallest Texan Cowboy, was above 7 feet 6 inches (2.28 meters) tall and weighed 228 pounds (104 kg). He was born Ralph Earl Madsen on April 19, 1897, in Norfolk, Nebraska, and was not from Texas as his nicknames and stories sug…
These stunning photographs show how New York City looked like in the 1880s and 1890s. The images depict the streets of the city that never sleeps, the hustling crowds of Manhattan, swimmers at Coney Island, and people’s everyday life. The photographs, t…
During the 1870s, Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz (1839–1911) was the leading foreign photographer in Yokohama, a primary Japanese port for trade and tourism. The aristocrat Stillfried was born in Komotau, Austro-Hungary, and, like his father, embarked o…