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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/2005/img/2005-12-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-12-FB-60.jpg BIG BITE
It was nearly 50 feet (15 meters) long and weighed 5 tons, with a mouth that could have gulped down a refrigerator. But we can only guess what Carcharodon megalodon looked like before its extinction about a million years ago. Though ancient sharks' teeth are among the most plentiful prehistoric animal remains—this 1927 image shows a six-inch (15-centimeter) megalodon tooth framing a modern great white's—their skeletons were made of cartilage, and many decomposed too quickly to become part of the fossil record. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-11-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-11-FB-60.jpg GRACE DURING WARTIME
Helping soldiers in a Washington, D.C., train yard in 1917 might have made Grace Vanderbilt feel closer to her own military man. Her husband, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, was serving in Europe as commander of the 102nd Engineers Division. His war honors would soon include a Distinguished Service Medal. Cornelius, known as Neily, was disinherited for marrying Grace. His father, millionaire railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt II, objected to the "older woman," who was indeed his son's senior—by three years. Neily's brother eventually restored the inheritance; the couple's marriage lasted throughout their lives. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-10-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-10-FB-60.jpg DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME
"The animal first learns to hold thus gingerly a ball the size of a human skull," notes this photo's caption in an October 1931 Geographic article on circus life. "Then gradually enough, weight is added to duplicate that of a man. Finally the performer substitutes his head for the dummy." This elephant's trainer, "Cheerful" Gardner, was admitted to the International Circus Hall of Fame in 1981, but the human pendulum trick is no longer performed in modern circuses—people might lose their heads. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-09-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-09-FB-60.jpg T. R.'S BULLY SHOT
Soon after leaving the U.S. Presidency in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt left for Africa. He'd pledged a "fine collection" of wildlife trophies to the Smithsonian Institution. Though his request for funding noted, "I am not in the least a game butcher," thousands of animals were killed on his expedition. T. R. described his conquests in the January 1911 Geographic, where this rhino photo ran. "While a rhinoceros's short suit is brains," he wrote, "his long suit is courage. He is a particularly exasperating creature to deal with." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-08-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-08-FB-60.jpg DRAWING ON THE FUTURE
Its driver may have been a dummy, but this model of the Ford Syrtis looked smart in 1953—when gas prices hovered at 29 cents a gallon. Sketched here by a designer from the company's Advanced Styling Studio, it boasted high-intensity headlights that beamed through fender peepholes. Though never manufactured, the Syrtis served as a concept car for Ford's 1957 Skyliner Hide-Away Hardtop. That auto's steel roof lifted with the push of a button and folded itself—in a minute-long mechanical ballet—neatly into the trunk. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-07-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-07-FB-60.jpg WELL, WELL, WELL . . .
Centuries ago the Gabrielino Indians relayed messages to each other from the top of a hill overlooking California's Pacific coast. But by 1941, when this photograph was taken, Signal Hill, near Long Beach, bristled with oil derricks. Discovered in 1921, the town's oil field became one of the most productive for its size in the world—so productive that relatives of those buried in a local cemetery received royalties for the oil pumped from beneath family graves. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-06-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-06-FB-60.jpg TRESS TEST
Every day in 1943 was a good hair day for this young woman—no matter what her own hair looked like. Part of her job at the Washington Institute of Technology was to evaluate shiny, severed ponytails of human hair. Strands from them were the main component in hygrometers. Those humidity monitors gauged atmospheric moisture by how much the hair strands lengthened or shortened. Not just any hair would do. According to this photo's notes, many of the locks came "from northern Midwestern states where Scandinavian blood predominates. A good hank of blond hair usually brings about $25." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-05-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-05-FB-60.jpg A BIT TOO FLASHY
The world's earliest underwater color photography began with a bang. Ichthyologist W. H. Longley and Geographic photographer Charles Martin spent months coordinating divers and dory boats off Florida's Dry Tortugas to take the first ever underwater Autochromes of sea life for the January 1927 issue. To light the submarine world, pontoon-borne pans of magnesium powder explosives were "discharged by the submerged photographer at the exact moment of his finny subjects' best posings." The resulting "blinding and deafening detonation" had drawbacks. "On one occasion," the article notes, "Dr. Longley was seriously burned and incapacitated for six days by a premature explosion of an ounce of powder." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-04-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-04-FB-60.jpg POWDER BUFFS
In the 1860s the U.S. Civil War depleted the American male labor force at the same time it increased the need for weapons. So girls and women began staffing munitions factories in both the North and South. They wouldn't be the first, or the last, females to take advantage of a wartime job boom. During World War I, in just one factory in France, 4,000 women were "employed 24 hours of each day grinding and filling high-explosive shells," noted an article in the April 1917 Geographic, where this image of French workers ran. "This war," another photo's caption claimed, "has given women their opportunity." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-03-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-03-FB-60.jpg RAISING THE ROOF
An uncapped Capitol building sprawled across its Washington, D.C., site in 1860. Its original copper-clad wooden dome, a fire hazard, had been removed four years earlier to be replaced by what to this day remains one of the world's largest cast-iron domes. The outbreak of the U.S. Civil War just months after this picture was taken halted projects across the city, but the Capitol construction continued—"a sign," Abraham Lincoln said, "we intend the Union shall go on." Lincoln's own life ended before construction did, and he lay in state beneath the dome's unfinished ceiling in 1865. The dome interior was completed a year later, and in 1874 Frederick Law Olmsted was hired to landscape the Capitol grounds. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-02-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-02-FB-60.jpg COLD COMFORT
Attention-getting structures like Los Angeles's Hoot Hoot ice-cream stand—with a head that spun like a real owl's and eyes that glowed at night—appeared along roadsides all over America in the 1920s. As automobiles became more popular, the shape of these buildings conveyed the nature of their merchandise to customers zooming by. Exactly why the Hoot Hoot's owner used a giant bird to help sell ice cream has been lost to history. The business has long since flown the coop. Today a Mexican restaurant stands in its place. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2005/img/2005-01-FB.jpg /flashback/2005/img/2005-01-FB-60.jpg GREAT EXPECTORATIONS
A spinning tabletop and strategically placed spittoons helped the U.S. Board of Tea Experts demonstrate tea tasting to Mrs. Lyonel Robinson, a New York women's club president, in 1954. The board set federal quality and taste standards during these sippings—and subsequent spitting outs—of imported teas. Examiner Robert H. Dick (to the right of Mrs. Robinson) was only the third person to head the board after its founding in 1897. He was also the last. Steeped in expertise, Mr. Dick stayed on until 1996, when Congress abolished the tea board. "Its demise was so completely unmourned," noted a Food and Drug Administration official, that the agency received barely "a postcard" in protest. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]>