While some people actually managed to predict it rather accurately, many of them look pretty hilarious from today’s perspective. The term “retrofuturism” was first coined in a 1960s book titled Retro-Futurism by T.R. Hinchliffe. In its more popular form, futurism (sometimes referred to as futurology) is “an early optimism that focused on the past and was rooted in the nineteenth century, an early-twentieth-century ‘golden age’ that continued long into the 1960s’ Space Age”....

After the Civil War, large numbers of white settlers moved westward, spurred on by the expansion of railroads. This migration reshaped the frontier, impacting the land and its inhabitants profoundly. Settlers not only cultivated the land but also hunted American bison extensively. Native American tribes often found themselves outnumbered in conflicts with both settlers and the U.S. government. By the 1880s, most Native Americans had been confined to reservations, often in remote areas....

With a keen fascination for the bustling humanity of Manhattan, he took his large-format camera out to the streets, capturing its people and places in all weather and seasons. Buildings, signage, vehicles, the passing throngs, isolated figures, curious eccentrics, odd corners, windows, doorways, alleyways, squares, avenues, storefronts, uptown, and downtown, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Harlem, his pictures document a rich portrait of the everyday life and architecture of New York....

Amidst the fervor of the atomic age, a remarkable and audacious creation emerged, capturing the hearts and minds of children with its promise of scientific marvels. Enter the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab Kit, a truly extraordinary and daring educational toy that brought the wonders of nuclear science right into the hands of intrepid young explorers. Conceived by the ingenious mind of Alfred Carlton Gilbert, a visionary toy inventor and relentless advocate for science education, the Atomic Energy Lab Kit was a daring experiment in itself....

The photographs, taken by Wallace G. Levison, was a chemist, inventor, and lecturer who founded the Departments of Mineralogy and Astronomy at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in the latter half of the 19th century. He used the new photographic technology both as a scientific tool and a recreational activity. The new developments in photography allowed pictures to be taken with faster and faster shutter speeds. And you can tell that the photographer had an obsession with motion and a delight with freezing actions that could previously only be recorded as a blur....

RAF Sergeants Butlin took off on an operation to Frankfurt at 23.15 hrs from RAF Burn in Yorkshire and ditched roughly 3 miles southwest of the Channel Island of Jersey after a call was made by Sgt. Odling for assistance. The body of observer Sgt. Holden was eventually washed up on St. Ouen’s Bay in Jersey on the 3rd June 1943. On the 5th June his and the body of a Sgt....

Starting from the early 20th century, people used elaborate contraptions, painful machinery, bizarre devices, and strange poses to get their ideal fit body. To illustrate just how far the industry has come, we’ve collected pictures showing the most bizarre ways people exercised over the past one hundred years. Over the decades, thousands of methods and programs emerged, all promising to get you in the best shape of your life in the quickest amount of time possible, quite often with exercise equipment that looked ridiculously flimsy and ineffective....

These structures, colloquially known as mobile homes, offer a captivating glimpse into a bygone era, when flexibility, craftsmanship, and the open road beckoned to a generation yearning for adventure. The concept of mobile living was not entirely novel during this era. However, it was during the early 20th century that it gained significant traction. The confluence of factors, such as improved transportation systems, economic opportunities, and the desire for a more transient lifestyle, led to the rise of wooden homes on wheels....

Back in the ’50s and ’60s, when low-cost 45-rpm vinyl singles were the most popular format for recorded music, thousands of independent mom-and-pop record stores across the country provided listening booths. These little cubicles were equipped with turntables, headphones and sample singles for the convenience of customers choosing among a number of prospective purchases. But the blossoming of the vinyl, which made scratched samples more expensive to replace, and the advent of record-store chains, which put customer service far below profits, led to the demise of the booths by the mid-’60s....

These vintage pictures scanned from old magazines and newspapers of those bygone decades, depict attractive women wearing as little clothing as the decency of the day allowed promoting and advertising computers. Technological innovations such as the diminishing cost of hardware and increasing computer miniaturization created new markets for computers during the 1970s. Small offices could take advantage of low-cost computers or gain access to mainframes through time-sharing services. The increase in the use of computers was accompanied by major technical, organizational, and social change at the workplace, which caused existing business processes to be largely adapted to electronic data processing, resulting in rapid growth in requirements for new work qualifications in offices and in manufacturing....

Directly across the Posner’s home stood the Nazi headquarters in Kiel, displaying the dreaded Nazi Party flag in the cold December night. With the eight lights of the Menorah glowing brightly in her window, Rabbi Posner’s wife, Rachel, snapped a photo of the Menorah and captured the Nazi building and flag in the background. She wrote a few lines in German on the back of the photo. “Chanukah 5692, (1932), “Death to Judah”, So the flag says, “Judah will live forever”, So the light answers....

In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The incendiary bombs created so much fire that a firestorm developed. The resulting firestorm destroyed 40 square kilometers (15 square miles) of the city center. The more the city burned, the more oxygen was sucked in – and the greater the firestorm became....

The Anglo-French Concorde was co-developed by BAC, a forerunner of BAE Systems, and Aerospatiale, now a part of Airbus, and has a storied history. New technology was required throughout the plane. A distinctive design innovation was the plane’s droop nose, which was lowered during takeoff and landing to increase a pilot’s view of the runway. The steering and control systems used an electronic interface known as fly-by-wire. There was a minor argument over the spelling of the name....

According to some sources, this is a real situation, other sources claim that this is a staged photograph. It’s most likely to be a staged event due to the various discrepancies in the photo. First, this does not look like an actual execution. They are too close to the wall to shoot without ricocheting and they’re not aiming or shouldering their guns in such a way that would indicate a readiness to fire....

The majority of the pictured soldiers are Germans, the rest from France, the United States, Belgium and they range in time from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II. Since the late 19th century, photo studios used fake airplanes, tanks, automobiles, trains, and other scrapped military props for their photoshoots. These photographs were meant to be souvenirs for servicemen to send home to friends and families....

The term Dust Bowl was coined in 1935 when an AP reporter, Robert Geiger, used it to describe the drought-affected south-central United States in the aftermath of horrific dust storms. Historically, the Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. Severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the phenomenon....

The color-enhanced images were captured by Hugo Jaeger, one of Adolf Hitler’s personal photographers. Mr. Jaegar buried the photos in a glass jar at the end of the war and they remained hidden there for 10 years until 1955 when he transferred them and around 2,000 other images to a bank vault. The Nazi Christmas was far from traditional. After taking power in 1933, Nazi ideologues initially renamed the Christmas festival Julfest, and propagated its Germanic origins as the celebration of the winter solstice....

The Department of Immigration took more than 2,300 civilian passengers and crew into custody and because they were civilians, they could not be called “prisoners’ of-war” but were named “enemy aliens”. The internees were moved to the Mountain Park Hotel in Hot Springs, located in Madison County, North Carolina. At the time, Hot Springs was populated by less than 700 American residents. Suffice to say, it was a major adjustment for citizens to have their population more than doubled by the Germans, whom they called “Germanies....

Nestled in the British Hong Kong territory, this unique enclave, covering a mere 6.4 acres (2.6 hectares), was home to tens of thousands of residents and workers for decades. By the 1980s, Kowloon Walled City housed up to 35,000 people, creating an extraordinarily compact community within its confines. The enclave comprised 350 buildings interconnected by hundreds of narrow alleyways. Known as the “City of Darkness,” it earned this name due to its severe lack of natural light....

Bhutto was a great admirer of Mao, emulating Chinese Communism with his own Islamic Socialism and Mao’s Little Red Books with a similar red book called “Bhutto speaks”. It was at this meeting that Mao agreed to transfer 50 kg of uranium to Pakistan, thereby jump-starting its nuclear programme and allowing Pakistan to later develop its first nuclear weapons in the 1980s. The photos from this meeting were last photos of Chairman Mao — and they made abundantly clear to everyone, including Mao, that he would not be alive much longer....