I Just Spent The Last Week Of My Life Looking For The Most Fascinating Pictures On The Internet, And These Are The 21 Best I Found
1.This is what Albert Einstein's desk looked like the day he died:
Specifically on April 18, 1955. Would you expect anything else besides this for Einstein's desk?
2.This is how incredibly small a hummingbird feather is:
We love to see a tiny feather.
3.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?
4.This is Stephen Taylor, the man with the world's longest tongue:
Apparently, he's since been dethroned by Nick Stoeberl. I don't really want to get too deep into the deep world of the world's longest tongue.
5.On Feb. 7, 1984, Bruce McCandless II performed the first-ever untethered space walk, and folks, it looks absolutely terrifying:
He used a jet-propelled backpack to maneuver around. It was apparently very, very cold.
6.Before you could just put everything into the Notes app on your iPhone, some people used metal grocery lists to do their shopping:
What are you picking up from the store? Gotta be some "catsup" and "vegetable" for me.
7.Some chickens lay eggs with white yolks:
It all depends on what you feed a chicken.
8.This is what a $1,000 bill looks like:
It was first put into circulation in 1928. That's Grover Cleveland's big mug on the front.
9.This is the safety net that was installed under the Golden Gate Bridge during its construction in the 1930s. The net saved 19 people through the duration of the work:
The 19 men who were saved by the net became known as the "Halfway to Hell Club."
10.In 1731, King Frederick I of Sweden was gifted with a lion that, after its death, he sent to be stuffed and preserved. The only issue was that the people doing the taxidermy had never actually seen a lion. This, the Lion of Gripsholm Castle, is the finished product:
Juuuuuust a bit off.
11.Speaking of terrible taxidermy and fossil reconstruction, this is the Magdeburg Unicorn, quite possibly the worst fossil reconstruction ever:
It was probably done by Otto von Guericke, who thought he had found the remains of a unicorn. Turns out he'd just mixed and matched the bones of a rhinoceros, a mammoth, and a narwhal.
12.This is what a baby pigeon looks like:
Ugly as all hell. Ever wonder why you never see a baby pigeon? That's because they don't leave the nest until they're basically full grown.
13.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.
14.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:
From Wonders of the Past, Volume II, 1933–34.
15.Here's another angle:
They're big!
16.While we're on the subject of incredible Egyptian art, this is a 3,000-year-old ancient Egyptian painter's palette, complete with six different colors:
It's from the reign of Amenhotep III, circa 1390 BCE. Let's get some love for Queen Tiye in the comments.
17.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.
18.This is Steven Spielberg on top of Bruce, the animatronic shark that, well, played Jaws in Jaws:
And now I'm realizing why the shark in Finding Nemo was named what it was.
19.This is Emma Morano, the last living person to have been born in the 1800s:
Emma, born in 1899, died at the age of 117 in 2017 after a short reign as the oldest person alive. She's also, obviously, the last person to have lived in three different centuries.
20.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.
21.And, finally, cars in Canada's Northwest Territories have polar bear license plates:
Wow. Just...wow. The world is an incredible place.
