Flashback - National Geographic Magazine

Current Issue November 2009
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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/2006/img/2006-12-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-12-FB-60.jpg FRONT LINES
A Salvation Army "lassie" writes home for a wounded World War I soldier in 1918. "Ask an American doughboy if life would have been worth living at the front without the Salvation Army cook, comforter, and general utility cheerer," noted a November 1918 Geographic story on war efforts. "Told by the colonel of a regiment that she would be killed if she persisted in serving her doughnuts and cocoa to the men while under heavy fire," one Salvation Army worker said: "Colonel, we can die with the men, but we cannot leave them." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-11-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-11-FB-60.jpg X-RAY BOUQUET
The ghost of a rose blooms in a radiograph by Albert G. Richards, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. He may have taught about teeth, but he thought about flowers, using dental equipment to x-ray his first, a daffodil, in 1960. Richards, now 89, went on to make more than 4,000 of the floral images over the next four decades. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-10-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-10-FB-60.jpg ARTIST'S PALETTE
"We'd give him an assignment and pay his expenses, and he understood what we wanted," said a former National Geographic editor about photographer Gervais Courtellemont. And "what we wanted" was color. Courtellemont had 24 Autochrome photo essays bloom from the largely black-and-white pages of the magazine between 1924 and 1932, among them "Color Contrasts in Northern Spain," "Along the Banks of the Colorful Nile," and "Rainbow Portraits of Portugal." This artistic idyll along the banks of France's Dordogne River was probably captured during the photographer's coverage of the October 1930 story "Beauty, History, and Romance Enrich the Château Country," but it was not included in that article. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-09-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-09-FB-60.jpg SOLE SURVIVORS
The cruel shoes of a Hindu fire walker in Durban, South Africa, were meant to prove the wearer's piety. "Indian mystics will tell you that by self-inflicted tortures the soul reaches through flesh-numbing ecstasy toward those higher states of being that lie between it and the Absolute," wrote Melville Chater in "Under the South African Union" in the April 1931 Geographic. The nail-spiked sandals may also have helped toughen the feet of the fire walkers, who ran through a bed of embers so hot that the "spectators must shelter their faces from it." Noted Chater: "Indisputably the foot soles of two of the [fire walkers], as they lay in collapse after the ceremony, showed ash dust, but no burns." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-08-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-08-FB-60.jpg HURRICANE AFTERMATH
"If New Englanders noticed the obscure news stories . . . telling of a tropical hurricane crossing the South Atlantic, they probably thought, 'Too bad for Florida,'" noted National Geographic. But on September 21, 1938, that "obscure" cyclone roared north, slamming the U.S. Northeast coast with 120-mile-an-hour (190 kilometers an hour) winds and a storm surge that left parts of Providence, Rhode Island, under nearly 14 feet (4 meters) of water. Eighty-eight percent of the New England Power Association's customers had no electric service—including this New London, Connecticut, gas station. Then, according to the April 1939 Geographic, where this photo appeared, "Yankee ingenuity" rode to the rescue. "Hundreds of automobiles were stalled for lack of fuel on New England roads until somebody thought of this solution," claimed the picture's caption. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-07-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-07-FB-60.jpg A SHORE THING
Coney Island had been luring hot, weather-weary New Yorkers for more than a century when this photograph appeared in the March 1951 Geographic; the picture's caption claimed a count of 1.3 million bathers. Not actually an island at all (decades ago, silt filled the shallow creek that separated it from the rest of Brooklyn), Coney is said to have been named for wild crowds of a different sort: In the mid-1600s, Dutch sailors observing the frolics along its dunes knew it as Conyne Eylandt, or "rabbit island." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-06-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-06-FB-60.jpg NOT NANOTECHNOLOGY
Studebaker was thinking big in 1931. On the field outside the auto company's Indiana proving ground, this wooden model of the President Four Season Roadster served as both advertisement and tourist attraction. More than twice the length of a normal Studebaker, the 11,000-pound (5,000-kilogram) giant could fit 50 people on its running boards and occasionally hosted an orchestra—the 25-piece Studebaker Champions—in its cockpit. But by September 1936, when this photo was published in the Geographic, the oversize roadster was no more. "Studebaker styling had progressed to a point where it no longer bore even a passing resemblance to the big car," says Andrew Beckman, archivist at South Bend's Studebaker National Museum. "In the spring of 1936, the fender was ignited, and in less than half an hour the President was reduced to ashes." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-05-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-05-FB-60.jpg CLIMB TO POWER
Queen Elizabeth II reaches out to four-year-old Prince Charles as he scales a window ledge at the royal family's Balmoral Castle in Scotland in 1953. National Geographic published this image in September of that year in an article on Elizabeth's coronation, titled "In the London of the New Queen." "I encountered quite a crop of stories about little Prince Charles," noted the author, H. V. Morton. "The best, I think, was told me by a man who said he had heard it from the mother of a guardsman." After ordering several Buckingham Palace sentries to perform drills, Morton wrote, the young boy suddenly tired of the exercise. He cried, "'Come on, let's play at horses; and the guardsmen dropped on all fours." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-04-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-04-FB-60.jpg AFTERMATH
"As these words are written, three days only have passed since San Francisco was shaken by the most destructive earthquake in her history, and the subsequent unparalleled ruin wrought by fire is not yet ended," wrote geologist Frederick Ransome in the May 1906 Geographic, published weeks after the April 18, 1906, disaster. His quickly assembled article, "The Probable Cause of the San Francisco Earthquake," was illustrated with maps of fault lines and the ominous scribbles of a seismograph. Readers had to wait for June's issue to see images similar to this one of the tumbled courthouse in Santa Rosa, California. Photo after photo revealed San Francisco's buckled streets, forlorn chimneys, and the ragged tent towns of the survivors. —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-03-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-03-FB-60.jpg PUCK OF THE IRISH
A visitor to the Puck Fair in Killorglin, Ireland, kicks a ball during a carnival game in 1956. "After he did not hit the first time," the photographer noted, "he bullied the boy who owns the game to put the ball at the right angle from where he was sure to hit." To launch the annual Puck Fair—which may stem from the ancient Celtic harvest festival called Lughnasa—locals capture a wild male goat, or "Puck," from the hills outside town and crown him king of the three-day event. The animal watches over the festivities from a cage atop an elevated platform and is released back to the wild on the fair's final day. Killorglin's fair royalty includes a queen as well, but she is no old goat: County Kerry schoolgirls compete in an essay contest to win the coveted title "Queen of Puck." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-02-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-02-FB-60.jpg HANGING IN THERE
The names of these climbers are lost to history, but the photographic record of their feat—a 7,000-foot-high (2,100-meter-high) "Tyrolean traverse" rope ride from one pinnacle to another in the Italian Alps—lives on as published in the August 1913 issue of the Geographic. "Some idea of the difficulties of rock work can be formed from this picture," noted the photo's caption in the magazine. "The least mistake in swinging between the two peaks means instant death." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]> /flashback/2006/img/2006-01-FB.jpg /flashback/2006/img/2006-01-FB-60.jpg POLE POSITION
When Navy flier Richard E. Byrd joined Donald MacMillan's 1925 Arctic expedition, he proved he could pilot more than a plane. As encroaching pans of pack ice menaced the explorers' ships, Byrd took to the bergs with a wooden board. The presence of polar bears was considered less of a threat. MacMillan explained in his account of the expedition in the November 1925 Geographic: "Fresh bear tracks kept the boys interested and a bit excited over the prospect of fine rugs for their dens." —Margaret G. Zackowitz]]>