50 Extremely Rare And Amazing Historical Pictures That Will Completely And Totally Change Your Perspective On The World

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19-07-2025

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:
This is the unfinished portrait of George Washington that was used as a basis for the design of the $1 bill:
The portrait was done by Gilbert Stuart, who apparently had something better to do than finish up ol' George's portrait?
This picture, taken in 1925, shows the passengers on an Imperial Airways flight watching one of the first in-flight movies ever:
They're watching a silent film called The Lost World. What do we think of that plane's cabin? Better or worse than today's economy?
And this is what in-flight entertainment looked like in the 1960s:
My neck hurts just looking at this.
There's a trap door on the Sphinx:
There's actually a bunch of holes in the Sphinx (do not discuss this sentence in the comments) that mostly lead to nowhere.
This is how the Eiffel Tower used to get painted — one precariously hoisted guy with a paint bucket at a time:
In the hours after he died, a death mask was made of Napoleon Bonaparte's face:
This was the menu served to the third-class passengers aboard the Titanic on the day the ship sank:
Put another way, that dinner was the last dinner a whole lot of people ever ate.
Here's a peak at what one of those third-class cabins looked like:
This photo from a Seattle lumberyard in 1919 show just how high stacks of lumber could go in those days:
It's as impressive as it is depressing.
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:
This picture, taken in 1946, is one of the first images of Earth ever taken from space:
It was captured from a 35-millimeter camera attached to a V-2 rocket.
You're, of course, familiar with Mahatma Gandhi...
But have you ever seen a picture of him as a young man? Here's Gandhi some time in the late 1800s:
Looking sharp, Mahatma.
This picture, from 1930, shows a plane flying over the old city of Baghdad, Iraq:
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:
This is Franz Reichelt sporting a homemade parachute suit that he was confident would save him if he jumped off the Eiffel Tower:
On Feb. 4, 1912, he gave it a go. It did not deploy.
These are what some of the Titanic's lifeboats looked like after they were docked in New York after the ship sunk:
Imagine being on one of those in the pitch black night in the middle of the ocean.
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:
And probably a lifelong hatred of pigeons.
This is the Thanksgiving menu that was served at the Plaza Hotel in 1899:
What are you going for? Might be partridge and orange jelly tarts for your boy.
These are the real-life outfits doctors would wear to treat plague patients in the 1600s:
Terrifying!
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:
You can see the ship behind the two men pictured.
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:
This is what Harriet Tubman looked like in old age:
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:
Schmitt was part of the 1972 Apollo 17 mission and an absolute pro at the space selfie.
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:
Here's another picture of a San Francisco street split in two:
Awful, awful stuff.
This is a statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, that was found inside the pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb:
Which makes it over 3,000 years old.
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:
It sounds like it's funny, but I assure you: it is not.
This is 455 pound Piet van der Zwaard AKA the "fattest man in Europe" in 1955:
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:
This X-ray, taken by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, is the first X-ray ever:
Well, one of the first. It's of his wife's hand.
This is what Chicago's Eureka Building looked like after a winter fire was put out by the Fire Department:
Like something out of a fantasy book.
Before he was James Bond, Sean Connery competed in the Mr. Universe pageant in 1953:
This is allegedly the death mask of William Shakespeare:
The mask itself was made in 1616, the same year Shakespeare died, and was discovered in 1849. There's a whole lot of controversy whether it's Bill or not.
While we're on the subject, this is the death mask of Ludwig van Beethoven:
That, we are sure of.
This is the View Phone, a video phone developed by Toshiba in 1964 that allowed for real-time proto-FaceTiming:
This the Brewster armor suit, one of the first fully functional suits of body armor designed for World War I combat:
All I'll say is you better not let Gru see you wearing that.
This is how huge the entrance to the Roman Temple of Bacchus is:
It's located in Lebanon. See that little speck down there? That's a person. The Romans pulled out all the stops for the god of wine.
Here's a vintage picture of a redwood tree showing just how huge they are:
This is a picture of a newly built telephone tower, complete with a ridiculous amount of wires, in Sweden, circa 1886:
This is the personal water closet of the last German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II:
What a beautiful toilet. Absolutely stunning.
This is the pistol Gavrilo Princip used to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand and set off World War I:
This pistol led to the deaths of over 16 million people.
And this is the car Franz Ferdinand was driving in:
Back when people were so inclined to do so, this was one way to board and travel by blimp:
This camouflage, known as "dazzle camouflage," was extremely popular during World War I:
It wasn't used to blend in, but because its "patterns would make it more difficult to figure out the ship's size, speed, distance and direction."
You're probably familiar with the front of King Tut's iconic death mask:
Well, this is what the back looks like:
During World War II, babies in England were fitted with baby-sized gas masks that were comically large:
Not baby-sized at all!
This is a room full of competitors at the 1980 Space Invaders video game world championships:
And, finally, this is apparently an eighth grade test from 1912. Are you passing it?
Feel free to describe the heart in the comments.