75 Absolutely Incredible Pictures That Will Completely And Totally Change Everything You Thought You Knew About History (2024)

1. This is what Albert Einstein's desk looked like the day he died: 2. This is what the Eiffel Tower looked like as it was being built: 3. Recognize these big ol' rocks? This is Mount Rushmore before the presidential heads were carved into it: 4. This is how big Plymouth Rock is in real life: 5. This is what Queen Elizabeth II looked like when she was 18: 6. This is what one of the world's oldest pairs of Levi's jeans looks like: 7. The Great Sphinx of Giza...has a tail!!! 8. This right here is what one of the Titanic's lifeboats looked like before the passengers were rescued: 9. This is what Abraham Lincoln looked like when he became president in 1861... 10. ...and this is what he looked like four short years later, in 1865: 11. Speaking of Honest Abe, this is Ralph Lincoln, the 11th-generation cousin of Abraham Lincoln: 12. This is Ruth Malcolmson, the woman who won the 1924 Miss America pageant: 13. This is how thick one of the cables holding up the Golden Gate Bridge is: 14. This is what Bob Ross looked like before he had his iconic hairdo: 15. These were some of the job necessities for a TWA flight attendant in the 1940s: 16. This is what Hong Kong looked like circa 1920... 17. And here's what it looks like today: 18. Before CGI, this is how MGM filmed its iconic movie intro: 19. You know, this one: 20. This is Maud Wagner, who is widely believed to be the first female professional tattoo artist in the US: 21. This is what the Oval Office looks like without any furniture in it: 22. This is what a dollar bill looked like in 1917: 23. This right here is Vincent van Gogh's painting palette: 24. This is what first class on a plane in 1960 looked like: 25. This is Robert Wadlow, the tallest man who ever lived: 26. And this is Pauline Musters, the shortest woman ever to live: 27. This is what the end of 13,000 miles of the Great Wall of China looks like: 28. This painting by Leonardo da Vinci is the most expensive painting ever sold: 29. This, wicker chairs and all, is what the interior of a plane looked like in 1925: 30. This 3,000-pound absolute unit is Lubber, the world's largest horse back in 1930: 31. In 1955, it cost $4.75 to go on 10 rides at Disneyland: 32. This is the violin Wallace Hartley, bandleader on the Titanic, played as the ship sank: 33. This monument to the doomed Donner Party shows just how deep the snow the unfortunate travelers had to deal with was: 34. This is the world's oldest surviving photograph, taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1827: 35. Here's what the original, un-enhanced world's oldest picture looks like today: 36. This is the Speyer wine bottle, the oldest known bottle of wine on Earth: 37. The presidents on Mount Rushmore were originally planned to look like this: 38. Michelangelo's "David" statue is really, really big in person: 39. This is what a 3-year-old Albert Einstein looked like: 40. This is what the iceberg that sank the Titanic looked like after being hit: 41. This is what the Mayan temple at Chichen Itza looked like before it was restored: 42. And this is what it looks like today: 43. This is Ham the chimpanzee, the first ape launched into space: 44. In 1907, world-class swimmer Annette Kellerman was arrested for indecency after she wore a bathing suit like this one to Revere Beach in Massachusetts: 45. This pointy thing is what a nuclear bomb actually looks like: 46. In 1962, three men escaped Alcatraz Island prison after fooling guards with papier-mâché decoy heads that looked like this: 47. This man, Gay Jewel, was declared the "world's heaviest man" in 1899: 48. This is what the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, looked like from the ground: 49. This beauty is Britain's oldest door, constructed almost 1,000 years ago, in the 1050s: 50. This is Charles Ponzi, the infamous scammer ponzi schemes got their name from: 51. This is a record of everyone who died and how they died in London during one week in 1665: 52. This is Margaret Gorman, the woman who won the very first Miss America competition in 1921: 53. This is just a small sample of what researchers found in King Tut's tomb after discovering it in 1922: 54. Before alarm clocks, people known as Knocker-Ups would get paid to go around in the early hours of the morning and bang on windows to wake people up: 55. This picture straight out of Harold Potter is of the former Cincinnati Public Library, built in 1874 and demolished in 1955: 56. This is a wax sculpture of Thomas Wedders, the man whose 7.5-inch nose was apparently the largest nose in history: 57. This is a picture from Abraham Lincoln's second inauguration in 1865. Can you spot him? 58. Speaking of Lincoln, this man, Valentine Tapley, vowed in 1860 to never cut his beard again if Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Here's him in 1896: 59. These are the real-life outfits doctors would wear to treat plague patients in the 1600s: 60. This is what the scalp of the Statue of Liberty looks like from the torch: 61. This is what the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC looked like in 1907: 62. And this is what it looked like 100 years later: 63. This is what the First Class Lounge on the Titanic looked like: 64. And this is what the Third Class dining room of the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic, looked like: 65. The man in the middle in this picture is a college-aged Richard Nixon: 66. This is the Times Building, the center of New York's Times Square, under construction in 1903: 67. And here's what that same area looks like over a hundred years later: 68. The original design for the Michelin Man was absolutely terrifying: 69. This is what the Golden Gate Bridge looked like while it was under construction: 70. These are hand-drawn sketches of the phases of the moon Galileo Galilei drew in 1610: 71. In the 1930s, this couple won an Atlantic City dance marathon after dancing for 1,473 hours: 72. And, yes, people did fall asleep standing up while dancing at these marathons: 73. Someone had to hand-carve all of the presidents' eyes on Mount Rushmore: 74. This is the message then-president Jimmy Carter sent aboard the Voyager spacecraft to any aliens the ship might encounter: 75. And, finally, California once had a place called the California Alligator Farm where children were encouraged to get up close and personal with alligators and even take them for rides: