Old photographs do something no textbook can: they show the faces, clothes and street corners of people who lived through famous moments, and the odd, funny ones too. This collection brings together 22 historical photos, from a soldier at the brand-new Berlin Wall and a handshake under the English Channel to Mark Twain glowing in Nikola Tesla's laboratory and the last known thylacine yawning in its cage.
Several of these images are famous online, and some travel with captions that are only partly true. For each photo below you will find what it shows, when and where it was taken where that is known, and the background that makes it worth a second look. Where a popular story cannot be confirmed, we say so. Photo credits follow each image.
Cold War Europe and a tunnel under the sea
A soldier helps a boy across the wire in Berlin
An East German soldier reaches over the barbed wire to help a small boy cross. The photo is usually dated 13 August 1961, the day East German forces sealed the border through Berlin with wire, before the concrete wall went up. Popular retellings say the boy had been cut off from his family and that the soldier was punished for helping him; we could not confirm those details, so treat them as unverified.
Sunbathers in Leningrad, 1970s
People in swimsuits lean against a sun-warmed stone wall in Leningrad, today's Saint Petersburg. Sunbathing against the granite walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress beside the Neva river is a long-standing city habit. The photo, credited to Jiří Tondl, shows a relaxed side of Soviet life that rarely made it into Cold War images.
The Channel Tunnel breakthrough, 1990
© Associated Press / East News
On 1 December 1990, English worker Graham Fagg and French worker Philippe Cozette broke through the last rock between the two halves of the service tunnel and shook hands in front of the press, waving each other's flags. The tunnel opened on 6 May 1994. It runs 50.46 km, of which 37.9 km lie under the sea, the longest undersea stretch of any rail tunnel in the world.
Pigeons spell a brand name in Venice
In St Mark's Square, crowds of pigeons appear to spell out the word Coca-Cola. The trick is said to have been done by scattering seed in the shape of the letters for an advertising stunt around 1960; the exact date and how it was staged are not well documented. Today feeding pigeons in the square is banned, and visitors can be fined.
Famous faces, young and old
Charlie Chaplin, 1916
Without the bowler hat and toothbrush moustache, Chaplin is almost unrecognisable. Born in London in April 1889, he was 26 or 27 when this was taken. That year he was making short films for the Mutual company on a contract that made him one of the best-paid entertainers in the world.
Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's laboratory
Mark Twain holds a loop that lights up with high-frequency current in Tesla's New York laboratory, with Tesla himself blurred in the background. The photograph dates from 1894. Twain, born in 1835, was 21 years older than the inventor, and the two were friends who shared an interest in science. A much-repeated story says Twain once stood on Tesla's vibrating platform for too long and had to rush to the bathroom; it is entertaining but hard to verify.
David Bowie at 16
Teenage David Jones, later David Bowie, poses with a saxophone and a bass drum painted with the name of his band, The Konrads. He played sax as a boy and joined The Konrads around 1962. His first single followed in 1964, under the name Davie Jones, before he adopted the name Bowie the next year.
The earliest known photo of Abraham Lincoln
This daguerreotype by Nicholas H. Shepherd, made in Springfield, Illinois, around 1846 or 1847, is the oldest known photograph of Lincoln. He was in his late thirties and had just been elected to the US House of Representatives. It would be another fourteen years before he won the presidency.
Princess Elizabeth in uniform, 1945
The future Queen Elizabeth II stands by a vehicle with fellow trainees. In early 1945 she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the British Army, and trained as a driver and mechanic. She was the first female member of the royal family to serve full-time in the armed forces.
Kings, cousins and the street
A beggar runs after King George V's carriage
A ragged man sprints beside an open carriage carrying gentlemen in top hats, holding out his hand. The photo circulates with the caption that the carriage belonged to King George V; the date and place are not recorded in the sources we could find. Whatever its exact story, it captures the gap between rich and poor in the early twentieth century in a single frame.
Tsar Nicholas II and King George V
The resemblance is not a coincidence. The two monarchs were first cousins: Nicholas's mother, Empress Maria Feodorovna, and George's mother, Queen Alexandra, were sisters, both daughters of King Christian IX of Denmark. After the Russian Revolution, Britain withdrew an offer of asylum to the tsar's family, and the Bolsheviks killed Nicholas, his wife and their five children in 1918.
Work, war and new machines
Women delivering ice, 1918
Two young women in overalls haul blocks of ice from a delivery cart. With millions of American men in uniform during the First World War, women took over heavy jobs such as ice delivery, factory work and streetcar driving. Photos like this one, held by the US National Archives, were also used to show the public that the home front was doing its part.
A woman on an Autoped, about 1916
The Autoped was one of the first motor scooters, made by the Autoped Company of Long Island City, New York, from 1915 to about 1921. Unlike today's e-scooters, it ran on a small 155 cc petrol engine mounted over the front wheel and reached about 20 mph. The woman in this photo is often identified as the British suffragist Lady Florence Norman, who rode one to work in London in 1916.
Students copying wartime posters, 1941
© Associated Press / East News
Young women in an art class in Port Washington work at drafting tables, copying posters. Images like this show how much of the Second World War effort depended on graphic design: posters urged people to buy bonds, save materials and keep secrets. The photo is from the Associated Press.
Testing a bulletproof vest, 1923
One man fires a pistol at another's chest from a few paces away, in a test of a protective vest in Washington, D.C. Live demonstrations like this were a common way for makers to prove their products to police departments. The photo comes from the National Photo Company collection, now held by the Library of Congress.
Building the Golden Gate Bridge
The bridge's towers rise over the strait before the main cables were strung. Construction began on 5 January 1933 and the bridge opened on 27 May 1937. Its 4,200-foot main span was the longest of any suspension bridge in the world until 1964. Eleven workers died, but a safety net under the deck saved nineteen others, who called themselves the Halfway to Hell Club.
Curiosities and puzzles
Cutting a sunbeam, 1886
A girl stands in a dark workshop and reaches into a shaft of light as if to cut it, while workers look on. It is a staged comic photograph by the Scottish photographer Adam Diston, made at a time when long exposures meant every "candid" scene had to be carefully posed.
The so-called "apeman" photo
A crouching man with a long, ape-like face stands between a man in a suit and a woman. The picture went viral on Imgur with the caption that an apeman had been found in the Brazilian jungle in 1937, but no source has ever backed that up. Its origin is unknown; it may be a film still, a staged hoax or a photo of a man with a medical condition, and it should be treated as a curiosity, not as evidence of anything.
A mirror selfie, 1912
A group of young men in caps and uniforms, one holding a trumpet, pose in front of a mirror while their camera on a tripod records the reflection. It is described as a German student fraternity. The idea of photographing yourself in a mirror is clearly much older than the smartphone.
Celebrating the end of Prohibition, 5 December 1933
Men in a bar crowd around a barrel and drink straight from it. National Prohibition began in January 1920 under the Eighteenth Amendment and ended when the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified on 5 December 1933. Thirteen years of bans had fuelled bootlegging and organised crime without stopping Americans from drinking.
Loss and memory
The last known thylacine
The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, was a striped, dog-like marsupial. The last known animal died at Hobart Zoo on 7 September 1936, only 59 days after Tasmania gave the species legal protection. The well-known 1933 film of the zoo's thylacine yawning was shot by naturalist David Fleay, who was bitten while filming. The name "Benjamin" often attached to it was invented in 1968 by a man who falsely claimed to have worked at the zoo. Bounties paid between 1888 and 1909 for more than 2,200 animals, together with disease and habitat loss, drove the species to extinction, which was formally declared in 1982 and 1986.
Otto Frank in the Secret Annex
Otto Frank stands alone in the attic of the Amsterdam building where his family hid from the Nazis from 1942 until their arrest in 1944. His wife Edith died at Auschwitz in January 1945, and his daughters Margot and Anne died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. Otto was the only one of the eight people in hiding to survive. He published Anne's diary in 1947, and the building opened as the Anne Frank House museum on 3 May 1960.
How to read old viral photos
Historical photos are wonderful, but they travel online stripped of context. A few habits help:
- Look for an archive. Images held by the Library of Congress, national archives or museums usually come with dates and names.
- Be wary of perfect captions. The apeman photo and the Berlin Wall story show how a dramatic caption can stick to a picture without evidence.
- Check the details. Clothes, cars and signs often confirm or contradict a claimed date.
Taken with that care, photos like these do bring the past back to life: not as a parade of curiosities, but as moments that real people lived through.
Sources: photo credits as given under each image; UNC Cold War archive: Soldier helps little boy; Wikipedia: Channel Tunnel; Wikipedia: Autoped; Wikipedia: Golden Gate Bridge; Wikipedia: Thylacine; Wikipedia: Otto Frank.
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ReplyDeleteWhen you mention the means to move, what kind of vehicle do you think of? Vehicles powered by electric power are environmentally friendly, typically electric moped scooter.
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