Argentia

Four jobs from our films. Any one of them could kill you.

1906: a San Francisco fireman, and 23 of 4,213 hydrants still had useful water.
1841: a helmet diver. Air came down a hose, pumped by hand.
1912: a board-track rider at 92 mph on wooden planks banked at 60 degrees, no brakes.
1815: a tomb digger in Egypt, crawling by candlelight through shafts that nobody had mapped, with a buyer waiting in Cairo for whatever came out.

Which one would you have quit after day one? Vote, then tell me why in the comments. I've got a guess which one wins and I think it's wrong.

All four stories:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

4 days ago | [YT] | 0

Argentia

The movie version of a tomb raider has a whip, a fedora and a rolling boulder. Not quite.

Look at the first photo. That's a tourist on the Great Pyramid, and the men in white robes are local guides physically hauling him up, block by block. It was a paid job.

In 1837 Colonel Howard Vyse didn't bother with traps or puzzles. He used gunpowder to blast his way into the chambers above the King's Chamber.

And the biggest find of the century wasn't made by an explorer at all. A family near Luxor found a hidden tomb packed with royal mummies, Ramses II among them, and quietly sold pieces from it for years before the authorities caught on in 1881.

So who were the real tomb raiders? Mostly people with a ladder, a buyer and a lot of nerve. The full story:
https://youtu.be/WWbdOp-aIUw

More early daredevils and brutal trades:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

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6 days ago | [YT] | 0

Argentia

Look at the bottom right corner of the most famous photo of the Depression. That's her thumb, wrapped around the tent pole.

Most prints you've seen don't have it. A few years after March 1936 someone scratched the thumb out of the negative, and the clean version is the one that went around the world. The Library of Congress scan of the original still has it. Tidied up. That's all it took.

By her own account, Dorothea Lange spent about ten minutes at that pea pickers' camp in Nipomo, California. Her caption says "mother of seven children, age thirty-two." She didn't write down a name.

The name was Florence Owens Thompson. Nobody knew it until 1978, when she told a reporter it was her. She said the picture that made Lange famous never paid her a cent, and honestly, I believe her.

Who was she, really, and what did that photo cost her? It's all in the film:
https://youtu.be/HU1yOXw5u1Y

More stories behind famous photos:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

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1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Argentia

Look at the sword resting under his hand. Twenty years earlier, that blade told every person on the street exactly who he was.

Samurai wore two blades, a long one and a short one. The pair is called the daishō, and only the samurai class was allowed to wear it. A commoner could, at most, carry one short blade.

Then in March 1876 the government banned carrying swords in public. Soldiers and police were the main exceptions. Gone. The one object that said who you were now stayed at home while you walked to work like anybody else in the city.

These two prints come from a Yokohama studio album dated around 1877, so right after the ban. Were these men still samurai, or posing in costume for foreign buyers? Honestly? I can't prove it either way, because the album never names them.

The full story of the world they lost, told through the photographs:
https://youtu.be/fWYsc3fxiSo

More vanished worlds of the 1800s:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list...

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1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Argentia

In 1995, Japan passed a law so families could claim back swords taken after the war. 674 claims came in. How many swords went home?

1 week ago | [YT] | 1

Argentia

By March 1946, Japan's police had collected 897,786 swords.
Family blades, kept in silk for generations.
Some were dumped in the sea.
Some went home in American duffel bags.
One was a National Treasure. It went to a sergeant nobody can find.
64 listed swords are still missing.

The full story, from the occupation photographs:
https://youtu.be/h3g0FgryYQ4

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1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Argentia

In 1926, Houdini lay in a sealed metal casket at the bottom of a New York hotel pool. Doctors said the air would last 3 or 4 minutes. How long did he stay under?

1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Argentia

Upside down. Straitjacket. Several stories above a Washington street.
Nailed in a crate. Dropped in the East River.
6 feet of dirt on top of him. He wrote: "the weight of the earth is killing."
91 minutes in a sealed casket at the bottom of a pool.

He walked away from all of it.

Then a few seconds in a dressing room did what none of this could.

100 years ago this week. The full story, restored from 100-year-old photos:
https://youtu.be/02FvlueFwXo

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1 week ago | [YT] | 0

Argentia

92 mph. No brakes. A wall of wooden planks banked at 60°.

In 1912, the crowd in Newark leaned over the rail to get a closer look.

Then the engine misfired… and the bike didn't go down.

https://youtu.be/04K1_20GVtM

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2 weeks ago | [YT] | 0

Argentia

In 1841, Roderick Cameron came up from 78 ft (24 m) in under 60 seconds. His suit was bone dry. The whites of both eyes were full of blood, and it was still there a month later.

That's what an early copper helmet could do to a man, and it had 4 ways to do it. The first photo is Boyson, a diver at Águilas, Spain, in 1902. The graves belong to Japanese divers on Thursday Island. In Broome, 29 divers died in 1913, and 33 more in 1914.

Graves of Japanese divers, Thursday Island, 1964: Jack Bain / QUT, CC BY 4.0

Watch the full film: https://youtu.be/zdV0wc1ChKA

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2 weeks ago | [YT] | 0