1.
Before it found its home in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty’s head was on display at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair:
2.
This is the unfinished portrait of George Washington that was used as a basis for the design of the $1 bill:
3.
This picture, taken in 1925, shows the passengers on an Imperial Airways flight watching one of the first in-flight movies ever:
4.
And this is what in-flight entertainment looked like in the 1960s:
5.
There’s a trap door on the Sphinx:
6.
This is how the Eiffel Tower used to get painted — one precariously hoisted guy with a paint bucket at a time:
7.
In the hours after he died, a death mask was made of Napoleon Bonaparte’s face:
8.
This was the menu served to the third-class passengers aboard the Titanic on the day the ship sank:
9.
Here’s a peak at what one of those third-class cabins looked like:
10.
This photo from a Seattle lumberyard in 1919 show just how high stacks of lumber could go in those days:
11.
Speaking of lumber, one of the more creative ways bootleggers would hide alcohol during Prohibition was inside trucks lined with wood, complete with a tiny trapdoor:
12.
This picture, taken in 1946, is one of the first images of Earth ever taken from space:
You’re, of course, familiar with Mahatma Gandhi…
13.
But have you ever seen a picture of him as a young man? Here’s Gandhi some time in the late 1800s:
14.
This picture, from 1930, shows a plane flying over the old city of Baghdad, Iraq:
15.
During the Battle of Britain in World War II, cows were painted with bright white paint to stop cars from hitting them during the nightly blackouts:
16.
This is Franz Reichelt sporting a homemade parachute suit that he was confident would save him if he jumped off the Eiffel Tower:
17.
These are what some of the Titanic‘s lifeboats looked like after they were docked in New York after the ship sunk:
18.
This totally safe device was known as a baby cage, a wire cage suspended out of an apartment window meant to give babies born in cities extra light and air:
19.
This is the Thanksgiving menu that was served at the Plaza Hotel in 1899:
20.
These are the real-life outfits doctors would wear to treat plague patients in the 1600s:
21.
This is a picture taken during Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic. None of the men on the expedition would survive:
22.
These are some of several disguises that US Intelligence thought Adolph Hitler would use if he managed to go into hiding after World War II:
23.
This is what Harriet Tubman looked like in old age:
24.
This is Harrison Schmitt, one of four living men to have set foot on the moon’s surface, and the one who did it most recently:
25.
The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 was the deadliest earthquake in US history, resulting in the deaths of over 3,000 people. In the aftermath of the disaster, you could literally see where the Earth split along the San Andreas Fault:
26.
Here’s another picture of a San Francisco street split in two:
27.
This is a statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, that was found inside the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb:
28.
This is the aftermath of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, a deadly event that claimed the lives of 21 people in Boston after a container holding over two million gallons of molasses burst, sending a wave of molasses several feet high through the city streets:
30.
This colorized picture of Ramses II’s Great Temple at Abu Simbel in Egypt, taken circa 1865, shows just how enormous the colossal statues in front of the entrance are:
This is what that same statue looked like before the years of sand that accumulated around it was cleared out:
31.
This X-ray, taken by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, is the first X-ray ever:
32.
This is what Chicago’s Eureka Building looked like after a winter fire was put out by the Fire Department:
33.
Before he was James Bond, Sean Connery competed in the Mr. Universe pageant in 1953:
34.
This is allegedly the death mask of William Shakespeare:
35.
While we’re on the subject, this is the death mask of Ludwig van Beethoven:
36.
This is the View Phone, a video phone developed by Toshiba in 1964 that allowed for real-time proto-FaceTiming:
37.
This the Brewster armor suit, one of the first fully functional suits of body armor designed for World War I combat:
38.
This is how huge the entrance to the Roman Temple of Bacchus is:
39.
Here’s a vintage picture of a redwood tree showing just how huge they are:
40.
This is a picture of a newly built telephone tower, complete with a ridiculous amount of wires, in Sweden, circa 1886:
41.
This is the personal water closet of the last German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II:
42.
This is the pistol Gavrilo Princip used to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand and set off World War I:
43.
And this is the car Franz Ferdinand was driving in:
44.
Back when people were so inclined to do so, this was one way to board and travel by blimp:
45.
This camouflage, known as “dazzle camouflage,” was extremely popular during World War I:
46.
You’re probably familiar with the front of King Tut’s iconic death mask:
47.
Well, this is what the back looks like:
48.
During World War II, babies in England were fitted with baby-sized gas masks that were comically large:
49.
This is a room full of competitors at the 1980 Space Invaders video game world championships:
50.
And, finally, this is apparently an eighth grade test from 1912. Are you passing it?
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