History is not about things that happened - it’s about people.
Here’s some great photographs of people who made a little bit of history - or just lived through it.
Because every one of them had a story.
Even if they’re not all human.
This is Ham the chimp in his space suit in the biopack of the Mercury-Redstone 2 prior to his 1961 test flight.
This next amazing photograph was taken in 1925:
Not only was this a fantastic achievement but neither of them murdered their girlfriends through a bathroom door afterwards.
The photograph is courtesy of Wellcome Images.
Here’s what Baywatch would have looked like that same year.
This photograph of a lifeguard was taken at Parkway in the 1920’s.
While we’re still at the beach, here’s another picture from the good ol’ days. Though I don’t think the good old days were that good for semi-aquatic marine mammals.
We mostly treat animals a little more kindly these days.
Okay, never mind the flapper with the flipper - here’s the Gipper.
That’s Ronald Reagan as a Lifeguard in Lowell Park in Illinois in 1927.
His face is instantly recognizable. These guys - not so much.
The photograph was taken in New Guinea during World War II. Even Mad Men may have winced at that piece of marketing.
Photograph is from the Otis Historical Archives of “National Museum of Health & Medicine”
Here’s a little girl who lived through that same brutal time in our history - and survived.
This little girl is Eileen Dunne, aged three, in the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, after being injured during an air raid on London in September 1940. The photograph is from the Cecil Beaton collection.
This week was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Following its construction in the summer of 1961 the mother and aunt of a young bride were separated from the rest of their family. They could not attend the wedding and the best they could do was congratulate the newly weds by calling out to them from the window of a building in Bernauer Strasse.
Heart- rending.
Back to the Roaring Twenties. That was some dumb decade.
This is how they tested bullet proof vests back then.
Blokes were tough in those days.
But the women were even tougher. This is Annie Edson Taylor, preparing to go over the Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Here she is afterwards, the first person to ever to perform the feat and survive.
A little wet, a little shaken up and though you can’t see it here, she has a small cut on her head.
But not bad, for sixty three years old.
It’s a shame we didn’t have photography much before the middle of the nineteenth century.
If we did, I could show you a picture of the world’s first detective - William Shakespeare.
No, not that one; the other one, his cousin:
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