Among these iconic figures, one stands out with its unique blend of charm and terror: the Michelin Man. The story of the Michelin Man begins in 1894 when the Michelin brothers, André and Édouard, founded the Michelin Tire Company in France. Seeking a distinctive brand identity, they turned to the world of advertising. While attending the Universal and Colonial Exposition in Lyon, the brothers noticed a stack of tires that suggested to Édouard the figure of a man without arms....

Consequently, motoring not only demanded new kinds of protective outerwear but also created another social occasion for sartorial display. Novel lines of purpose-designed clothing and accessories rapidly evolved, from car rugs and overcoats to boots and gauntlets. Some were more practical than alluring, but from the outset motoring expressed affluence and privilege, linking driving with glamor and style – an image used to promote diverse products from tires to oil and still promoted in car advertisements today....

Traveling on foot and by mule, Bingham and his team made their way from Cuzco into the Urubamba Valley, where a local farmer told them of some ruins located at the top of a nearby mountain. The farmer called the mountain Machu Picchu, which translates to “old peak” in the native Quechua language. Bingham and his team hiked six days with excavation and camera equipment from the city of Cusco to the town of Aguas Calientes, where he inquired at an inn about local ruins sites....

In 1889, Johnstown was home to 30,000 people, many of whom worked in the steel industry. On May 31, the residents were unaware of the danger that steady rain over the course of the previous day had caused. A spillway at the dam became clogged with debris that could not be dislodged. An engineer at the dam saw warning signs of an impending disaster and rode a horse to the village of South Fork to warn the residents....

The photo was shot from a distance of about 236,000 miles (380,000 km) and shows half of Earth, from Istanbul to Cape Town and areas east, shrouded in night. Though the photo revealed no detail on Earth’s surface when it was taken in 1966, people on Earth who saw this photo were stunned by it. Lunar Orbiter 1 was one of five Lunar Orbiters sent to the moon in the 1960s by NASA....

The man’s face conveys a sense of grief so profound as to transcend our expectations. The photo is nicknamed “The weeping Frenchman” and by some other sources as “The Crying Frenchman“. The French regimental flags had been moved into the south of France in order to preserve them from the surrender. The glory of France has been ground underfoot by German armies. In six weeks, the vaunted French army, the Maginot Line, and all of France’s pride were destroyed by the German blitzkreig....

They are known for the wars they fought, the legislation they signed into law, and the scandals they brought to the Oval Office. These interesting photos show US presidents looking cool and doing “non-presidential” things. There have been 46 presidencies (including the current one, Joe Biden, whose term began in 2021), and 45 different individuals have served as president. Grover Cleveland was elected to two nonconsecutive terms, and as such is considered the 22nd and 24th president of the United States....

The world had waited expectantly for its launching and again for its sailing; had read accounts of its tremendous size and its unexampled completeness and luxury. Had felt it a matter of the greatest satisfaction that such comfortable, and above all such a safe boat had been designed and built – the “unsinkable lifeboat”; – and then in a moment to hear that it had gone to the bottom with fifteen hundred passengers!...

The facility covered 20,000 acres (81 km2) and had 997 hangars, shops, barracks, warehouses, and other buildings. It had 800 instructors taking in classes of 300 new cadets every month. A 980-foot rail-highway bridge and a 400-foot trestle bridge across Oso Bay had been built; a twenty-mile-long railroad was built in thirty-five days. A sixteen-inch cast iron water pipe was laid from Corpus Christi to Flour Bluff. Eight miles of 100 pair telephone cables for a permanent telephone system were laid in ten days....

In 1944, Americans started to use the word ‘teenager’ to describe the place of youth in their society. From the very beginning, it was a marketing term that recognized the spending power of adolescents. Within a culture that thought of business in terms of national identity and individual freedom, the fact that youth had become a market also meant that it had become a discrete, separate age group with its own peer-generated rituals, rights, and demands....

Someone must have thought it’d make a good candid photo. The blonde girl is probably hitting her, but more of a stunt punch than a real one. Even if it is staged, it’s still historical. The theme of this picture is young, attractive women, dancers, exercising in the manner associated with men, which would have been an unusual thing for a woman to do in that time (especially boxing obviously)....

Passive acoustic location involves the detection of sound or vibration created by the object being detected, which is then analyzed to determine the location of the object in question. Horns give both acoustic gain and directionality; the increased inter-horn spacing compared with human ears increases the observer’s ability to localize the direction of a sound. Acoustic techniques had the advantage that they could ‘see’ around corners and over hills, due to sound refraction....

His lower legs are swollen due to beriberi, an illness which is caused by the lacking of vitamin B-1 (thiamine) in the diet, and his legs are most likely swollen from the illness. Beriberi was common in South East Asia due to the diets being predominantly of white rice, which has the husk of the seed removed to extend the time before it becomes inedible – except the husk contains the essential vitamin B-1....

During the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, it was customary to cast a death mask of a great leader who had recently died. A mixture of wax or plaster was carefully placed over Napoleon’s face and removed after the form had hardened. From this impression, subsequent copies would be cast. Contrary to some accounts of Napoleon’s death, it was not Dr. Antommarchi who made the original mask or so-called “parent mold”; it was the surgeon Francis Burton of Britain’s Sixty-Sixth Regiment at St....

The air filter canister has been removed from the gas-mask 38. Special extra eyepiece lens were issued for cold weather to prevent fogging by creating an airspace between the two lenses. The German military was the largest employer of motorcycles during World War II 1939-45. On June 22, 1941, Germany launched its Operation Barbarossa, the 3-million-man invasion of the Soviet Union. During the campaigns that followed, the military motorcyclist served a variety of functions including chauffeur service for officers, delivering dispatches, even hot meals, as scouting patrols, as point vehicles taking the brunt of battle, sometimes as specially equipped tank destroyers....

Here, seemingly alone in a crowd in Logan County, West Virginia, JFK speechifies from a kitchen chair as, mere feet away, a young boy absently plays with a jarringly realistic-looking toy gun. JFK went on to win the West Virginia primary, with 61 percent of the vote. In many aspects this photo is a proof of how the times have changed. Simpler times, as noted by the entire scene. It’s amazing that he is campaigning to a mere 75-100 people....

They produced some of the finest images of late Victorian Egypt, yet so little is known about them. They were probably Greek Cypriots, although it has been suggested they may have come from Crete. Nothing is known of them before their photographs were published in Egypt in the late 1870s, and even the names of the brother themselves are unknown. It has been suggested their initials were “C” and “G”, and indeed early 20th-century photographic postcards bearing the same “C Zangaki” have been located....

Immediately after the distress, the military control center ordered the pilot to deploy the ejection seat to save himself and to let the plane go down. But Major Makowicka disobeyed, instead he pulled up to prevent the plane from crashing into the TKC (Textile Combinate Cottbus) with its thousands of workers, intending to let the plane crash into an empty field instead. There was no time to get that far away....

Each day at the end of the shift, the miners would have to go through the x-ray machine for inspection. Some miners would swallow diamonds, even hide them in self-inflicted incisions in their legs. Original caption from Getty Archives: 10/27/1954-Kimberly, South Africa- All African mine workers are x-rayed before leaving the diamond mines. A trained radiologist like the one in the picture can easily identify even the smallest diamond, which a would be thief might attempt to smuggle out of the mine in his stomach....

In September 1942, Office of War Information photographer Marjory Collins paid a visit to the offices of the New York Times, located at the iconic One Times Square and an annex on 43rd Street. There, she documented each step of the messy, physical process as news coming in over the wires was sorted, edited, rewritten, laid out, and printed, all under an ever-approaching deadline. The Thursday, Sept. 10, 1942 issue was dominated by news of fighting in Europe and the Pacific, as well as rationing and cutbacks on the home front (along with recaps of a Yankees victory over the Browns and horse races at the Aqueduct Racetrack)....