If anything can capture a moment or a memory better than our brain, it’s a photograph. And sooner or later we are bound to become a memory too. Photos can keep things alive in a very different way. Also, you can’t possibly remember every moment of your life but photos help. Same is the case with the world.
Here 40 such unique photos through history that you may not have seen before:
1. The last photo of the Titanic before it sank. Taken on 11th April, 1912.
2. Bill Gates in a CD commercial from 1994, that said, “This CD-ROM can hold more information than all the paper that’s here below me.”
When was the last time you used a CD-ROM for your documents?
3. A test pilot ejects right on time before his plane nosedived, 1962.
Guy on tractor: “WTF!”
4. Pakistani soldier checking for circumcision to identify Hindus during the Indo-Pak war of 1971.
There was no way of escaping this.
5. The first international match at Wimbledon, 1883.
Can you picture Nadal & Federer here?
6. A female officer chasing boys who chose to go skinny dipping.
7. John Lennon’s glasses when he was assassinated on 8th December, 1980.
The world he had “imagined” never came to.
8. Anne Frank’s father, Otto, in the attic where the family hid from the Nazis in 1960. No one else survived.
9. Hannah Stiley, the first person to be photographed. Clicked sometime during 1840.
And she forgot to smile.
10. Billy The Kid, 1879. The only photo that exists of the outlaw.
11. Infamous mobster Al Capone gets his son an autograph from Chicago Cubs’, Gabby Hartnett, circa 1931.
12. Coca-Cola, when it was first introduced. France, 1950.
3rd man from the left: “What is this sorcery?”
13. A human chess board being played in St. Petersburg, Russia, 1924.
I just hope this wasn’t like wizard’s chess!
14. The US oil crisis in 1973 left so little traffic on the road that people could actually have a picnic on a highway.
Getting high on highways.
15. Indiana Jones set, when CGI did not exist.
16. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. holds up Charlie Chaplin at Wall Street in 1918 in an attempt to promote liberty bonds.
17. A typical early morning for train commuters in Japan.
18. A swim-mobile in New York, 1960.
19. A neurologist electrocutes a man’s face to study facial muscles, circa 1862.
20. Iranian women protest the forced use of Hijab post the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Hard to imagine Iran like this now.
21. An innovative way of tackling floods in Paris, 1924.
22. IBM transporting a 5 MB hard drive in 1956.
1 TB back then would’ve filled an entire building.
23. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas playing with water pistols during a shoot in Sri Lanka in 1983.
Spielberg is a master at ‘shooting’.
24. Alfred Hitchcock enjoying with his grand kids in the snow, 1960.
25. A sea of hats in New York, 1939.
26. Salvador Dali out for a walk with his pet anteater.
And yet, his moustache steals the show.
27. Winston Churchill borrowing a ‘light’ from a Frenchman in 1944.
28. Bill Clinton clicked with his ‘assistant’ Monica Lewinsky.
29. Robin Williams performing mime in Central Park in 1974. The photographer clicked without knowing it was the young comedian.
30. A pickup truck in Philippines fleeing as volcano erupts in the background. The Mount Pinatubo eruption on 17th June, 1990, was the second largest of the 20th century.
31. A British foot guard faints as Queen Elizabeth II rides on a horse during the colour parade, June, 1970.
32. Albert Einstein’s office the night he died, exactly the way he left it.
33. A Soviet soldier happily carrying around the head of a Hitler statue after Berlin was seized in 1945.
34. Sean Connery signs a coconut for a Jamaican girl during the shooting of Dr No in 1962.
35. On the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg Union and Confederacy veterans decide to shake hands, circa 1913.
So many of us played this war strategy game. These men lived it.
36. Hitler comforts a soldier who tries to salute him despite having frostbite, sometime in 1940s.
37. Two women of 30, Queen Elizabeth and Marilyn Monroe, shake hands during the premiere of a movie in October, 1956.
A queen in real life meets the queen on screen.
38. 16-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger during his first bodybuilding competition in 1963.
How did you look like when you were 16?
39. A video game championship held in 1980.
Now we settle for nothing less than a PlayStation 4.