Long before anyone could edit a photo on a phone, cameras were recording things that still seem hard to believe: cars driven by propellers, babies hung outside windows in wire cages, divers sealed inside suits of solid metal.

Looking at them today, it is tempting to assume they are fakes. Most are not. They come from a time when inventors tried almost anything, showmen sold tickets to anything unusual, and doctors were still learning how the human body worked.

What follows is a look at those moments and the facts behind them, including a few famous ‘medieval’ objects whose real history is very different from the legend.

A publicity-style photo for the Ramset fastener, a tool that uses a small gunpowder charge to fire hooks and pins into solid concrete. The labels explain that the hooks were shot into the wall, and then people sat in chairs hanging from them, ‘stacked sitters’, at just four square feet per person. Powder-actuated tools like this are still used on building sites today.

A general shaking hands with an alien, and a UFO beaming over a city at night. Both are digital fantasies made to look like old photographs, not archive pictures. Their popularity shows how easy it has become to create convincing ‘vintage’ images. When a photo seems too strange to be true, it pays to ask where it came

A giant spoked wheel with a tiny driver from the 1800s. Before gears and chains, a bigger wheel meant more distance for every turn of the pedals, which is why the ‘penny-farthing’ bicycle had one huge wheel. Inventors kept trying odd layouts like this tricycle. The flaw was height: falls from the top were dangerous, and the chain-driven ‘safety bicycle’ of the 1880s replaced them all.

A rare vintage photograph

A rigid ‘armored’ diving suit. A soft canvas suit is squeezed by water pressure, so designers built metal suits with sealed ball joints that keep the diver at normal air pressure, whatever the depth. They were heavy, awkward and often leaked at the joints. Yet the idea survives today in modern atmospheric diving suits used for deep work.

A rusted helmet with an unexploded shell stuck in it, turned up in a ploughed field. Battlefields keep giving up their leftovers. In northern France and Belgium, farmers still dig up shells from World War I every year, a harvest locals call the ‘iron harvest’. Bomb-disposal teams remove tons of it annually, and some shells still contain explosives or gas.

A baby ‘cage’ hung from a window. It was patented in 1922 by Emma Read of Spokane, Washington, who wanted city babies to get fresh air even if the family had no yard. Doctors of the time were firm believers in fresh air for infants. Baby cages were used in apartments in London and New York, and Eleanor Roosevelt reportedly bought one for her daughter. They faded away as traffic and safety worries grew.

Tutankhamun, Egypt’s famous boy king, shown through his mummified remains and a modern reconstruction of how he may have looked. He died around 1324 BC at about eighteen or nineteen. CT scans and DNA tests point to a bone condition and malaria rather than murder, which had long been the popular theory. His tomb, found almost untouched in 1922, is still the most famous discovery in archaeology.

HE DUG A GRAVE FOR HIS DYING DAUGHTER. YEARS LATER, IT BECAME A GARDEN. In 2017, Chinese farmer Zhang Liyong learned that his 2-year-old daughter, Xinlei, had severe beta thalassemia, a blood diIn England, the Wickham Market Hoard has yielded a treasure trove of 840 Iron Age gold coins, unearthing hidden riches

On October 22, 1895, the Granville to Paris express arrived at Gare Montparnasse too fast, crashed through the station wall and fell to the street below. Despite the dramatic photo, only one person died, a woman on the street hit by falling masonry. The train was running late, the brakes failed to stop it, and the driver was fined 50 francs. It is still one of the most famous railway images ever taken.

British soldiers watch over a long bed of soil with boots and gloved arms poking out of it. The original caption has been lost, and the exact purpose is unclear from the photo alone: it could be a drill, a test or a staged scene. Old photographs often outlive the stories behind them, which is why some of them keep us guessing for generations.

A periscope rifle, so a soldier could aim and fire from a trench without lifting his head above the parapet. The idea arose in World War I, when snipers made peeking over the top deadly, and Australian soldier William Beech is often credited with building the first at Gallipoli in 1915. The rifles were clumsy and hard to aim, so most soldiers went on using ordinary ones.

A man’s head held still in a metal frame, a tube in his mouth, his face coated and his eyes shielded. The photo is described as a 1930s freckle-removal treatment using a chemical peel. The frame kept the patient perfectly still while the chemicals worked. It looks like a torture rig, but the 1930s idea of a beauty treatment often did.

A woman in a gas mask pushing a baby carriage designed to protect the baby from gas. In the late 1930s Britain prepared for gas attacks that never came. By September 1939 about 38 million gas masks had been issued, including special helmets for babies, which a parent pumped with air by hand, and colorful ‘Mickey Mouse’ masks for young children.

A rare vintage photograph

Why did divers need armor? At about 100 feet down, the water presses with four times the pressure at the surface. Soft suits left the diver exposed to it, and coming up too fast caused the ‘bends’. Rigid suits like this one kept the diver at normal pressure inside a metal shell. They were bulky and hard to move in, and most designs never left the experimental stage.

A skull with a neat round hole, which looks like trepanation, one of the oldest surgeries known. People drilled or scraped openings in the skull as far back as the Stone Age, probably to relieve pressure after head injuries. The astonishing part: many ancient skulls show bone growing back around the edge of the hole, which means the patient lived. Studies of ancient Peruvian skulls suggest a large majority survived.

This photograph captures Façade No. 19 in the Catacombs of Paris (Catacombes de Paris) and was taken in 1861 by the French photographer Félix Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon).

Discovered in a coastal excavation site in 2024, this remarkable paleontological find dates back to the Miocene epoch, approximately 23 to 3.6 million years ago. The site features an exceptionally well-preserved specimen of Otodus megalodon, showcasing massive jaws lined with serrated triangular teeth over six inches long. The colossal skeletal remains, hoisted by metallic rigging, provide unprecedented insights into the apex predator’s anatomical structure and marine dominance during prehistoric times.

A telephone exchange with row after row of operators. Before dial phones, every call went through a person who plugged a cable into a socket to connect two lines. Telephone companies hired young women because customers found them calmer and more polite than the boys who had worked the first switchboards. Human operators lasted well into the 1960s in many places.

Discovered near Mpaluzi, close to the border of Swaziland in South Africa, this remarkable geological formation features a massive human-like footprint embedded vertically in rough granite rock. Estimated by some geologists to date back millions of years—potentially between 200 million and over 3 billion years—the imprint measures an astounding 1.2 meters in length. Detailed examination shows a deeply indented heel, arch, and toe outlines, sparking intense debate among scientists. While some believe it is a natural weathering phenomenon, others consider it an unexplained prehistoric anomaly.

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Some content was generated using AI tools (including ChatGPT) and edited by the author for creativity, storytelling, and historical illustration purposes. Historical facts and key details should be verified against reliable historical sources. Any AI-generated or reconstructed visuals are intended for illustrative purposes and should not be interpreted as original historical photographs or archival evidence.