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Flashback

Each month, National Geographic features a photograph from our archives in Flashback. Browse through the galleries of historical images for a view into our past.

/flashback/2004/img/2004-01-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-01-FB-60.jpg A BLANK LOOK The back resembled a 20-ton waffle, but it was the front of the 200-inch (500-centimeter) Pyrex "mirror blank" that absorbed New York-based Corning Glass Works physicist George McCauley, at left, with associate J. C. Hostetter. Though his first attempt was flawed, McCauley's second try (right) was successful; he babied that disk through flood, ridicule, and a rare upstate New York earthquake. In March 1936 he moved it to California, where it was polished to concave perfection (an 11-year process) to reflect and focus light in the Palomar Observatory being built near San Diego. In 1948 engineers installed the disk at Palomar—the world's most powerful optical telescope until Hawaii's W. M. Keck Observatory opened in 1993. Today Palomar still gives astronomers a nightly star-studded show. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-02-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-02-FB-60.jpg ALL FIRED UP A bed by night, a seat by day, and always a source of warmth, the kang, a masonry platform—its origins possibly reaching back to the Han dynasty—was once common in rural north China. Smoldering coals beneath a brick surface generated heat. Here, Chinese sleep at a country tavern. An adjacent photograph in the June 1927 Geographic showed guests awake on the kang, rice bowls in hand. "At mealtimes small, low tables are placed upon it, and at night numerous mats convert it into a warm, hard bed," the photo caption explained. The pillows, noted the photographer, "are filled with millet and are very hard." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-03-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-03-FB-60.jpg SKIRTING THE ISSUE Showing off her slinky style, a woman in São Luís, in northeastern Brazil, poses with the skin of a green anaconda for members of a National Geographic aerial survey team. The story of their expedition, "Skypaths Through Latin America," in the January 1931 Geographic, featured a shot of the same snakeskin with the caption, "Anacondas big enough to swallow a calf infest the delta of the Amazon." The world's heaviest snakes, green anacondas weigh as much as 500 pounds (200 kilograms) and measure nearly 28 feet (10 meters) long. This one—maybe 200 pounds (90 kilograms) and 16 feet (5 meters) long when it could still slither—was a relative lightweight. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-04-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-04-FB-60.jpg TIGER TERRITORY "What was to be done about the tiger?" Joseph Rock asked in his March 1922 article, "Hunting the Chaulmoogra Tree." In Burma (now Myanmar) on an expedition to gather rare seeds, Rock—a legendary explorer and botanist—visited a village terrorized by this wild cat. Two women had been killed, another badly wounded, and a two-year-old girl was missing. "All we found was a trail of blood which led into the forest," Rock wrote. "I shall never forget how the poor husbands of the slain women worked on that trap," Rock recalled of the snare the villagers set. It got results. "The captured creature's rage was terrible to behold," and after "only a few minutes . . . 20 spears ended its savage existence." The next day the grieving villagers woke to find "the sky still weeping over all this tragedy." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-05-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-05-FB-60.jpg WARSAW IN WINTER A portrait photographer waits for clients in downtown Warsaw in 1947. He may have waited a while. Adolf Hitler had ordered the city destroyed after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising—a revolt against occupying Nazi forces led by the Polish underground a year after the uprising by Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. The city was eventually rebuilt after Germany's defeat, and Poland's economy was gradually rebuilt too, especially after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. This month, the nation becomes a member of the European Union. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-06-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-06-FB-60.jpg WHEEL LIFE BEGINS To New Yorkers around 1910, it may have seemed as though all the automobiles in the U.S. had converged on Fifth Avenue. The city had its share of the wealthy, and cars were a rich man's toy. Manhattan also boasted something much of the country lacked: well-paved roads. Those roads were about to get busier. In 1913 Henry Ford's new factory assembly line made mass production of cars possible. By 1920 about half the 9.2 million vehicles in the United States were Ford Model T's. As supply grew, prices dropped, and automakers offered installment plans to make purchasing cars easier. But in New York, at least, parking them only got more difficult. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-07-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-07-FB-60.jpg ECLIPSED On June 19, 1936, as Muscovites waited for a total solar eclipse to darken Russian skies, some donned protective viewers designed to filter out retina-burning rays. Others seemed more interested in Pravda's news about one of Russia's native sons than in the sun overhead. Maksim Gorky, beloved novelist and playwright, had died the day before. Despite his stature as the "father of Soviet literature" and head of the Soviet Writers Union, Gorky became disillusioned with Stalin's leadership. Suffering from tuberculosis and heart problems, Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov (Gorky, meaning "bitter one," was his pen name) died at 68. He may well have been helped along by a fatal dose of poison: Rumors persist that Stalin ordered Gorky's murder. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-08-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-08-FB-60.jpg WE LOVE LUCY Six stories high, with portholes for eyes and a spiral staircase in each hind leg, the elephant-shaped building known as Lucy has towered over Margate City, New Jersey, since 1881. A real estate developer built Lucy to lure customers by offering them pachyderm-top views of land for sale. Since then the structure, modeled after an Asian elephant, has served as a home, tavern, and—as seen here in 1932—a privately owned tourist curiosity. In 1970 Lucy was relocated to a nearby park, and a long restoration began. Today the elephant—the interior painted its original "gastric pink"—is open for tours. "You know," says architect Margaret Westfield, who helped make the old elephant look new, "Lucy is actually a male." We know: Female Asian elephants don't have the big tusks. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-09-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-09-FB-60.jpg A GIFTED PAST During the Society's early days, unsolicited photos occasionally found their way into our archives. In 1917 an 86-year-old retired New York dentist sent the Geographic some pictures—including this portrait of an Apache man—made "in Arizona away back in 1879 & 80. There are some good ones you could use if you should ever write up and illustrate Arizona," the dentist, T. S. Hitchcock, wrote. "Now, you can keep them. If they're worth a year's subscription, all right." They remained unpublished, until recently. And as far as we can tell, Hitchcock never did get free magazines. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-10-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-10-FB-60.jpg FEATHER IN HIS CAP The population of the largest woodpecker in North America, the crow-size ivorybill, was already small by March 1938, when guide J. J. Kuhn and ornithologist James Tanner banded this baby in a Louisiana swamp. After jumping from its nest, the little ivorybill "climbed up Kuhn's arm . . . until it reached his shoulder . . . and gave a few sharp taps on his cap. . . . Upward it climbed until it was perched on the cap," wrote Tanner, who returned it to its nest. Though Tanner sighted the same bird the next year, only a few more ivorybills were ever seen, anywhere. The last confirmed sighting was in 1971 in southern Louisiana. Most ornithologists now believe the ivorybill is no more. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-11-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-11-FB-60.jpg DIGGING IT Finding mammoth tusks wasn't a mammoth task in Alaska in the early 1900s. Though extinct for some 10,000 years, woolly mammoths left a lot of themselves behind. Often ancient ivory was found poking from the snow, but this tusk hunter probably had to dig for his. In another unpublished shot from our archives, he stands between the tusks, gripping a shovel. Notes on the image say the bottom of the pit where the tusks were found was "covered with hair and small pieces of bones." Many tusk hunters in Alaska and elsewhere sold their finds. A September 1907 Geographic article reported that in Siberia "there has been a regular export of mammoth ivory. More than 100 pairs of mammoth tusks have come into the market yearly during the last 200 years." They're still coming. Trade in mammoth ivory remains legal to this day. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2004/img/2004-12-FB.jpg /flashback/2004/img/2004-12-FB-60.jpg SIGN OF THE TIMES "We had just come through the Khyber Pass, where murders and hold-ups are common occurrences," observed globetrotting journalist Lowell Thomas. Traveling to Afghanistan in 1922, he and his team ignored the posted warning and crossed the border anyway. Mountain driving was difficult even without the threat of bandits. One of Thomas's group "remarked that if the blankety-blank caravan track got any rockier we should have to trade our Buick for a burro. . . ." The team photographer, Harry Chase, "always looking at the sunny side," said at one point, "It must have been about here that one of the last Europeans to enter Afghanistan had been murdered." Thomas survived the trip. Though his byline—and this photo from our archives—never ran in the Geographic, his book Beyond Khyber Pass was published in 1925. His career in broadcasting had yet to begin. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]>