11. USS Los Angeles
USS Los Angeles rigid airship flying over Manhattan during the 1920’s.
There were plans to make The Empire State Building a docking station for airships.
12. Officer
British Army officer travelling in a hammock in Sierra Leone, 1920.
13. Archers
Three archers in Japan, 1860s.
The men are practitioners of Kyudo, Japanese Zen archery. Their outfits and the way they hold their second arrows (Ya) between their fourth and fifth fingers give this away. The target is most likely 28m away from the men, since they are shooting outdoors at what appears to be a makeshift range. Traditionally, 28m outdoor shooting is the final and most advanced stage of training in Kyudo. Beginners practice indoors (sometimes outdoors) on a target only 2m away. Practicing with such a close target ensures you cannot miss, so you can work on refining your shooting technique. Traditional Kyudo is not about marksmanship at all, but rather about the act of shooting itself. The Ya (arrows) are traditionally made with feathers from each wing of a single bird. One Ya has the right wing’s feathers, the other has the left wing’s. This causes one arrow to spiral to the right and the other to spiral to the left as they are shot from the Yumi (bow).
14. Boxing
Boxing in 1913. Ray Campbell vs d*ck Hyland (1913). Ray Campbell is listed as the official winner of this fight. It appears that Campbell is the fighter on the left and Hyland is on the right.
The fighters are battered, bloodied, bruised and staring down each other at the end of the fight. Boxing in those days was very different. There was no mandatory eight count. There was no neutral corner. If your opponent knocked you down, the second you get off your knees, you’re getting punched by a guy who’s been loading up his power shot for seconds (an eternity in the ring).
The report from the newspaper “The Call” of San Francisco: Ray Campbell, formerly of San Francisco, and a boxer who has established quite a reputation over the short distance route in the northwest during the last few months, came to the front in leaps and bounds today at Steveston, when he cleverly and clearly outpointed the famous “Fighting d*ck” Hyland, a former world’s title aspirant in the lightweight ranks, in a 15 rounds bout, which proved to be one of the best ever witnessed around Vancouver. A left jab with a right cross that landed more often that it missed, won the bout for Campbell.
15. Standoff
The standoff at Checkpoint Charlie: Soviet tanks facing American tanks, 1961.
In October 1961, border disputes led to a standoff and for 16 hours the world was at the brink of war while Soviet and American tanks faced each other just 300 feet (100 meters) apart. On August 1961 Washington and its British and French allies had failed to prevent the Soviets building the Berlin Wall. On October 27, after several days of escalating U.S. rebuffs to East German attempts to get American officials to show identification documents before entering East Berlin (thus indirectly acknowledging East German sovereignty, rather than Soviet occupation authority) ten U.S. M-48 tanks took up position at Checkpoint Charlie.
There they stood, some 50 meters from the border, noisily racing their engines and sending plumes of black smoke into the night air. Alarmed by the apparent threat, Moscow, with the approval of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, sent an equal number of Russian T55 tanks rumbling to face down the Americans. They too ground to a halt some 50 meters from the East/West Berlin. This was the culmination of several days escalation of actions on both sides and the face-off of the Soviet and American tanks, with guns uncovered, the first (and only) such direct confrontation of U.S. and Soviet troops.
By now, American officials were deeply alarmed by the potential consequences. General Clay of the American troops was reminded by Washington that Berlin was not so “vital” an interest to be worth risking a conflict with Moscow. President Kennedy approved the opening of a back channel with the Kremlin in order to defuse what had blown up. As a result, the Soviets pulled back one of their T55s from the eastern side of the border at Friedrichstrasse and minutes later an American M48 also left the scene. Soon the rest of the Soviet tanks withdrew, followed shortly by reciprocal withdrawal of the U.S. tanks.
Khrushchev had been equally uninterested in risking a battle over Berlin. In return for Kennedy’s assurance that the west had no designs on East Berlin, the Soviet leader tacitly recognized that allied officials and military personnel would have unimpeded access to the East German capital.
The Berlin crisis arose from what one may term “objective factors” – the fact that West Berlin was an anomalous Western enclave well to the east of the Iron Curtain, precipitating a clash of concrete interests of the Soviet Union and the West. The confrontations of armed tanks facing off at Checkpoint Charlie is, however, an excellent illustration of how “subjective factors” such as differing perceptions and beliefs of the two sides also contributed to tension – and could even have precipitated war.
16. Edwin Buzz Aldrin
Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin Buzz Aldrin poses with the US flag planted on the Sea of Tranquility,1969. If you look closely, you can see Aldrin’s face through his helmet visor.
At 10:39 pm on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar module. As he made his way down the lunar module’s ladder, a television camera attached to the craft recorded his progress and beamed the signal back to Earth, where hundreds of millions watched in great anticipation. At 10:56 pm, Armstrong spoke his famous quote, which he later contended was slightly garbled by his microphone and meant to be “that’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”. He then planted his left foot on the gray, powdery surface, took a cautious step forward, and humanity had walked on the moon.
Buzz Aldrin joined him on the moon’s surface at 11:11 pm, and together they took photographs of the terrain, planted an American flag, ran a few simple scientific tests, and spoke with President Richard Nixon via Houston. By 1:11 am on July 21, both astronauts were back in the lunar module and the hatch was closed. The two men slept that night on the surface of the moon, and at 1:54 pm the Eagle began its ascent back to the command module. Among the items left on the surface of the moon was a plaque that read: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon–July 1969 A.D–We came in peace for all mankind”.
The Apollo 11 mission used Hasselbad 500ELM cameras, a camera which had been available commercially for about 5 years at the time. It was, like most cameras at the time, completely wireless. It has an electric motor drive for advancing the film between shots, but other than that it was completely mechanical. Like all film back then it had to be processed, except in this case they had to travel the quarter million miles back to Earth before they knew if they had a good shot or not. They didn’t even use viewfinders to frame these shots, they were all taken “from the hip” and if you look through the thousands of photos taken from the moon the number of really poorly framed shots outweigh the good shots by about 1 to 10.
17. Three People
Bedouin from the province of Halep (Aleppo); Bedouin woman from the province of Halep; and married Jewish woman from Halep, 1873.
18. Captured Commissar
A captured Soviet commissar talking to his encircled comrades through a loudspeaker, Petrozavodsk, September 27th 1941.
19. Tommies in the Tropics
British Soldiers patrol the ruins of Bahe during the advance on Mandalay. January, 1945.
20. Polish Boy
A young Polish boy at Eisenach concentration camp (a sub-camp of Buchenwald concentration camp) enjoying his first meal of US Army rations following the camp’s liberation by American forces. Eisenach was a slave labor camp where inmates made military equipment for BMW, 9 April 1945.
