1. Springtime Autochromes, 1900s
Found on Société française de photographie. More about the surprising art of autochromes here.
2. How to get people to come to your art show
Found on This isn’t Happiness.
3. Royal Neighbors of America, one of the largest women-led life insurers in the USA
The early members of the Society were ahead of their time. In addition to providing life insurance for women, they stood firmly behind the women’s suffrage movement. Royal Neighbors was also one of the first fraternal societies to insure children and recognize mortality studies establishing the fact that women live longer than men, and to reflect that difference in life insurance premiums.
Found on Wikipedia.
4. Remember JFK Jr.’s George Magazine?
The political lifestyle magazine “George” once had the largest circulation of any political magazine in America, partly due to the celebrity status of its founder JFK Jr. To boost sales, Kennedy posed in the nude in a 1997 issue.
5. Moon Trees
Dozens of so-called “moon trees” scattered around the country, grown from seeds that traveled with astronaut Stuart Roosa on the Apollo 14 mission in 1971… the arboreal oddities were almost lost to history.
Want to know where they are? Find them via National Geographic.
6. I Flew the Same Route as the 1920s Airmail Pilots, and Lived to Tell the Tale
Read the full article on The Smithsonian.
Further reading: The Forgotten Giant Arrows that Guide you Across America, left behind by a forgotten age of US mail delivery.
7. Camel’s Smoking Billboards
For two and a half decades the Camel Cigarette was advertised with two novel billboards that were so clever they easily caught the attention of the passing public. Known as spectaculars, these billboards blew the illusion of a giant smoke ring every four seconds. Steam from a piston-driven diaphragm was forced out of a hole, and this mimicked a person smoking. The spectacular most often photographed was located in New York City’s Times Square at 44th Street and Broadway. Some consider this Camel billboard the most famous of all outdoor advertising signs. –Reddit.
You may also be interested in this NY Times article “When Neon owned the Night“.
8. Upper West Side, NYC, 84th Street Broadway, 1879
What it looks like now:
When Manhattan Was Mostly Hills and Shrubbery:
Found on Reddit.
9. The Cactus Dome
The Runit Dome, also called “Cactus Dome” or locally “The Tomb“, is a 115 m (377 ft) diameter, 46 cm (18 in) thick dome of concrete at sea level, encapsulating an estimated 73,000 m3 of radioactive debris, including some plutonium-239. The debris stems from nuclear tests conducted in the Enewetak Atoll by the United States between 1946 and 1958. You can read more about that in “The Poisoned Paradise Island“.
10. How to stay in your favourite author’s home
From Agatha Christie to Ian Fleming to Jane Austen, BBC Travel has five famous author homes-turned hotels where bookworms can lay their heads.
11. A 16th Century Ritual axe
Decorated with skulls and crown motifs. It’s made from gilded bronze and rock crystal. Kham region. Derge, Tibet or China. Found on Reddit.
12. That this exists:
Available on Amazon.
