Historidex / History facts

History facts, each with a real photo

These history facts each come with a real photograph or film from a public archive and a link to the source. Read a few below, or open Historidex for ten new ones every day.

Recent history facts

• The earliest known photo of a person 1838, Paris, France

  This Paris street was packed with carts and people, but the exposure took several minutes, so anything moving vanished. A man having his boots shined at bottom left stood still long enough to appear.

• The Viceroy arrives by elephant 1902, Delhi, India

  Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, and his American wife Mary ride into Delhi on December 29, 1902, for the Durbar marking Edward VII's coronation. The king did not attend. At the Durbar ball Mary wore a gown set with beetle wings that many guests mistook for emeralds.

• The Sphinx, partly dug out late 1800s, Giza, Egypt

  For long stretches of its history, sand covered the Sphinx up to its shoulders. Napoleon's soldiers did not shoot off its nose. It was gone centuries before they arrived.

• The New York Female Giants 1913, New York, United States

  A Library of Congress caption names these players as Miss Schnall, the catcher, and Miss Slachu of the New York Female Giants. Schnall, the captain, was among the American women barred from 1912 Olympic diving. Police stopped one Giants game at Lenox Oval in May 1913.

• A Gardener Gets Soaked 1895, Lyon, France

  A boy steps on a gardener's hose, and the gardener peers into the nozzle to see why the water stopped. Louis Lumière filmed it in Lyon in spring 1895. It is often called the earliest film comedy.

• Ambrosius, the leader Gildas named 5th century, Britain

  Gildas, writing in the 500s, never mentions Arthur, but he credits Ambrosius Aurelianus with rallying the Britons against the Saxons before their victory at Badon Hill. Arthur appears in a Latin history compiled in Wales about 830, and no one has shown he existed. This Welsh picture of Ambrosius was drawn around 1500.

• Whitman and the cardboard butterfly 1870s, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

  Walt Whitman told a friend the butterfly on his finger was a real moth. It was a cardboard cutout, and the Library of Congress still holds it. The wire on the prop matches a band around his finger in this 1870s portrait.

• The moai with a body 1914 or 1915, Rano Raraku, Rapa Nui

  Early accounts called the statues on Rano Raraku's slopes heads, because many are buried to the neck. Digs since, including the Routledges' in 1914 and 1915, showed torsos below the ground. This moai, photographed on that expedition, stands with its torso clear and a rider beside it for scale.

• The Glass Armonica Franklin Invented 18th century, Probably Germany

  Benjamin Franklin invented the glass armonica in 1761 and had each of its glass bowls color-coded by note. This example at the Met is 18th century and possibly German, not one of Franklin's own.

• A Water Ball on Artemis II 2026, Aboard Orion, in space

  Artemis II astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen watch a ball of water float inside Orion. In weightlessness, surface tension pulls the drop into a sphere, and it bends light like a lens. The mission ended with a splashdown on 10 April.

• The night Dreamland burned 1911, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York

  In May 1911, workers were fixing a ride at Dreamland, on Coney Island, with hot tar when a bucket of it was knocked over. The fire that followed left the amusement park in ruins. Firefighters hose down the wreckage here.

• Elephants Walk Past Carved Elephants 1921, Angkor Thom, Cambodia

  Real elephants walk past a wall of carved elephants on the Terrace of the Elephants at Angkor Thom in this film from 1921. The terrace takes its name from that frieze of elephants. The film also records the city's gates and the Bayon temple.

• Tennessee's Man Made Badlands 1939, Ducktown, Tennessee

  Copper miners cut the forests around Ducktown, Tennessee, to fuel open-air ore roasting, and the sulfur fumes killed the plants that remained. About 32,000 acres were damaged and the bare hills eroded, according to the TVA. Marion Post Wolcott photographed the scene in September 1939.

• Mail delivered by cruise missile 1959, Mayport, Florida, USA

  On June 8, 1959, the submarine USS Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile carrying about 3,000 letters instead of a warhead. It landed at Mayport, Florida, roughly 22 minutes later. The Postmaster General called the flight historic.

• The Alaska Highway handshake 1942, Beaver Creek, Yukon

  In October 1942, two Army bulldozer crews building the Alaska Highway toward each other met at Beaver Creek, Yukon. Corporal Refines Sims of the 97th Engineers, an African American unit, shook hands with Private Alfred Jalufka of the 18th Engineers. The highway was dedicated on November 20, 1942.

• The Gould Stradivari violin 1693, Cremona, Italy

  Antonio Stradivari built around 1,100 instruments in Cremona, most of them violins. Estimates of how many survive range from about 500 to 650. This one, the Gould violin, dates to 1693 and was given to the Met by George Gould in 1955.

• A Theatre Torn Down in Two Minutes 1901, Broadway, New York City

  Biograph's camera watched Broadway's Star Theatre come down in 1901. The company said it took one exposure every four minutes, eight hours a day, for about a month. Played back, the demolition runs about two minutes. Frederick S. Armitage was the cameraman.

• Six men against New Orleans' rats 1914 to 1920, New Orleans, Louisiana

  After a sailor died of bubonic plague in New Orleans in June 1914, the Public Health Service went after the city's rats. Crews sealed buildings against rats, and these six men pose with wire traps and buckets. One account counts more than half a million rats killed in 1914 and 1915.

• A glazed watchtower for the dead 1st to 3rd century CE, China

  Han dynasty tombs often held pottery models of buildings, called mingqi, or spirit objects. This green glazed watchtower has bracketed roofs, an outside staircase and latticework screens. It dates to the 1st to early 3rd century CE.

• Toussaint Louverture and his constitution 1801, Saint-Domingue, now Haiti

  Born enslaved, Toussaint Louverture fought for Spain, then switched to France after it abolished slavery in 1794. His 1801 constitution banned slavery forever in Saint-Domingue, but it also made him governor for life and let him use police rules to keep field workers on the plantations. He died in a French prison in 1803.

• Echo balloon inside a blimp hangar 1959, Weeksville, North Carolina, USA

  A balloon 100 feet across sits fully inflated inside a Navy blimp hangar at Weeksville, North Carolina. Filling it on the ground took about 40,000 pounds of air, while in orbit a few pounds of gas was enough. Echo 1 reached orbit in August 1960.

• Paris's moving sidewalk 1900, Paris, France

  The 1900 Paris world's fair had a moving sidewalk with a still platform beside two moving ones. Visitors stepped from the still platform onto a slow one, then onto a faster one.

• The earliest photo of the White House 1846, Washington, D.C., USA

  This daguerreotype of the White House's south front, attributed to John Plumbe Jr., dates to about 1846, early in James K. Polk's presidency. It is the earliest known photograph of the building. Bare trees and patches of snow point to winter.

• Giant heads on a mountaintop 1st century BCE, Mount Nemrut, Turkey

  On a peak in southeastern Turkey, King Antiochus I of Commagene built a tomb-sanctuary in the first century BCE, with a mound about 50 metres high and giant seated statues of himself and the gods. The heads have come off their bodies and now rest on the ground.

• New York's pneumatic subway 1870, New York City, USA

  Alfred Ely Beach opened a one-block demonstration subway under Broadway on February 26, 1870. A giant fan pushed a single car through the 300-foot tunnel. Rides cost 25 cents, and the line sold over 400,000 of them in its first year.

• Harvard Observatory's women computers c. 1891, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

  Around 1891, women at Harvard College Observatory measured and classified stars on glass photographic plates. They were paid much less than men, so director Edward Pickering could hire more of them on the same budget. Pay usually ran 25 to 50 cents an hour.

• Mark Twain in Tesla's lab 1894, New York City, USA

  Mark Twain holds a loop of wire and a glowing lamp in Nikola Tesla's New York lab in spring 1894. High-frequency current passing through his body lit the lamp. The photo ran in Century Magazine in April 1895, a month after fire destroyed the lab.

• K2 on giant glass plates 1909, Baltoro Glacier, Karakoram

  Vittorio Sella photographed K2 in 1909 on the Duke of the Abruzzi's expedition. He was known for working with large 30 by 40 centimeter glass plates, and he designed his own pack saddles and rucksacks to carry them.

• Sewing a sunshade for Skylab 1973, Houston, Texas

  Skylab lost its micrometeoroid shield, which also shaded it from the Sun, at launch on May 14, 1973. In Houston, teams rushed to build a replacement. Here a GE seamstress sews one candidate, a sail of aluminized Mylar and nylon, though the crew launched on May 25 with a folding parasol.

• War Work at Corpus Christi 1942, Corpus Christi, Texas

  Virginia Young, right, was a supervisor in the Assembly and Repairs Department at the Naval Air Base in Corpus Christi, Texas, in August 1942. The government caption calls her a Pearl Harbor widow and says she found housing for out-of-state women workers like Ethel Mann, who ran an electric drill.

• Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde 1891, Mesa Verde, Colorado, USA

  A young Swede, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, photographed Cliff Palace in 1891, then tried to ship his Mesa Verde finds out by train. Locals had him arrested in Durango, though no law covered what he did. The affair added to the pressure behind the Antiquities Act of 1906.

• Portrait of Ida B. Wells 1893, Chicago, Illinois, USA

  After a mob destroyed her Memphis newspaper office in 1892, Ida B. Wells was warned not to come back and settled in the North. She kept investigating lynchings, and for A Red Record in 1895 she used the Chicago Tribune's tallies, compiled by white men, rather than Black sources.

• A temple singer's outer coffin about 1000 to 945 BCE, Thebes, Egypt

  Henettawy was a singer of Amun at Thebes. The Met says she was buried in a plundered tomb first made for Minmose, an official of Hatshepsut, and her coffins fit one inside the other like Russian dolls. Met archaeologists excavated the tomb in 1923 to 1924.

• A rare survivor of Aztec gold c. 1345 to 1575, Central Mexico

  Most Aztec gold was melted into bars after the Spanish conquest, which makes gold pieces like this 11 cm warrior rare. He holds a dart thrower, darts and a shield, and the gold shows he was elite. The calendar glyphs on his back read 2 Rabbit, 3 Water.

• Gemini 7 Seen From Gemini 6A 1965, Earth orbit

  Gemini 6A caught up with Gemini 7 on December 15, 1965, the first rendezvous of two crewed spacecraft. Gemini 6A took this view of Gemini 7 during the rendezvous, which brought the two as close as about one foot. Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford played "Jingle Bells" on a harmonica and small bells.

• Inside Karnak's Great Hypostyle Hall 1851 to 1852, Karnak, Thebes, Egypt

  Felix Teynard photographed the central columns of Karnak's Great Hypostyle Hall in 1851 to 1852. The hall has 134 columns in 16 rows, and 12 of them stand about 21 meters tall. Most of the building was done under Seti I and Ramesses II.

• Men Beneath Xerxes' Gate about 1880 to 1895, Persepolis, Iran

  A group of men stand at the foot of the Gate of All Nations at Persepolis in an album photograph from around 1880 to 1895, attributed to Antoin Sevruguin. Xerxes I, who ruled from 486 to 465 BCE, ordered the gate. Its name comes from an inscription in the gate itself.

• The zip gun for America's first spacewalk 1965, Houston, Texas

  NASA's Hand-Held Self-Maneuvering Unit, nicknamed the zip gun, pushed Ed White with jets of pressurized oxygen on the first American spacewalk, June 3, 1965. Its gas ran out sooner than planned, and White then moved by pulling on his tether. A camera was mounted on top.

• Times Square From Above 1905, Times Square, New York City, USA

  In 1905 Biograph cameraman Wallace McCutcheon filmed Times Square from the top of the new Times Building. The New York Times moved into the tower that January. The film is held in the Library of Congress.

• A pilgrim's flask from Egypt 400 to 600 CE, Egypt

  Pilgrims carried flasks like this one home from the shrine of Saint Menas in the desert southwest of Alexandria. Cleveland says they probably held oil from the lamp that burned over his tomb. Such flasks have turned up as far away as England.

How these history facts are checked

Every story is checked three times before it is published: once by the writer against two sources, then by two independent fact-checkers. The photo's rights are checked as well, so you only see images that are free to use.

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