This is real footage of Paris in the 20s

This is one of the most famous paintings in the world, and most people don’t know that its fame began with an insult... It’s Impression, Sunrise, painted by Claude Monet in 1872 in Le Havre, the port town where he grew up. Looking out over the harbour early one morning, he painted the orange sun rising through the mist, a few dark boats on the water and the shapes of ships fading into the haze. When he was asked for a title for an exhibition catalogue, he admitted it didn’t really look like a view of Le Havre, so he simply said: “Put Impression.” In 1874, he showed it in Paris alongside a group of young painters who had been shut out of the official art world. The critic Louis Leroy went to see it and wrote a mocking review in a satirical newspaper, joking that even unfinished wallpaper looked more finished than this seascape. He titled it “The Exhibition of the Impressionists” and he meant it as a joke. Instead, he had just named one of the most important art movements in history... Over a century later, the painting made headlines again, when armed men walked into the Paris museum where it hangs and stole it in broad daylight. It was missing for five years before police finally found it in Corsica. Today it’s back on the wall of the Musée Marmottan Monet: a hazy sunrise that was once mocked, then stolen, and still gave its name to a whole new way of seeing the world and to an entire chapter of art.

A woman with $20 of groceries in the 70s In 1975, a pound of white bread averaged about 36 cents, a half-gallon of milk about 79 cents, and a dozen eggs about 77 cents. A gallon of gasoline cost roughly 57 cents.

The forgotten Volkswagen gooseneck trailer In 1974, a small company in Indiana had a wild idea: why should only pickup trucks get to tow fifth wheel campers? The result was El Chico, a camper trailer that hooked onto a hitch mounted on the roof of a Volkswagen Beetle. Because the trailer pivoted right above the car, the little Beetle could turn completely around underneath it, and the trailer itself was meant to hold everything you needed for a road trip, from a kitchen to a place to sleep. For decades, the film was nearly the only proof it had ever existed, and many people assumed it was just a prototype. But a handful turned up years later, and at least one has been fully restored, still hitched to a Beetle. As the inventor’s own son put it, “El Chico is a unicorn of sorts.”

This is what Barcelona looked like in 1908

I love the story behind this painting. The man who made it had failed twice at the most important art competition in France. Instead of trying again, he went home to his village and painted the farmers he had grown up with. And that’s what made him famous... It’s called October, painted by Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1878. In a wide, open field, a young woman bends forward to tip a basket of freshly dug potatoes into a big sack, and her face is so alive it almost seems to lean out of the canvas toward you. Behind her, another woman kneels in the brown soil, smiling as she gathers more into her basket, while potatoes lie scattered all around them and a few more workers are dotted across the hillside under a cloudy autumn sky. Nothing in the scene has been dressed up for the viewer. It’s simply the harvest, the ordinary work that had to be done every October before winter came. Bastien-Lepage knew this world from the inside: he grew up in that same village, Damvillers, among the families who worked these fields, and he even wrote its name in the corner of the canvas, just above his signature. Paris loved it, and when it was shown at the Salon of 1879, it became one of its great attractions. A few years later, the painter Vasily Surikov wrote to a friend that, in an entire Paris exhibition, only a handful of works had “true dignity.” Out of all the grand paintings on those walls, the first one he named was this simple harvest scene...

This is real footage of German soldiers marching through Paris after the surrender of France

This is real footage from 130 years ago Paris in 1896

This is the last known photograph of Nikola Tesla. On 7 January 1943, the man who helped bring electricity into every home in the world died alone in a small hotel room in New York, with almost nothing to his name. In the 1880s, Tesla’s inventions for alternating current, above all his AC motor, were licensed by Westinghouse, made him rich and famous, and helped make possible the kind of electrical system that still powers the world today. But a few years later, when Westinghouse ran into financial trouble, Tesla agreed to give up the royalty deal that might have made him a fortune, and he poured much of what he had left into his next idea, and his next idea was enormous... He wanted to send messages, and even electricity itself, through the earth without wires. In 1901 he persuaded the most powerful banker in America, J.P. Morgan, to give him $150,000 to build a giant tower at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island. Morgan thought he was paying for wireless communication but Tesla’s real plan was to prove he could transmit power. When he asked for more money to make the tower bigger, Morgan refused. The project collapsed, and in 1917 the tower was blown up and sold for scrap to pay Tesla’s debts. Ever since, one line has followed the story, supposedly Morgan’s reason for walking away: “If anyone can draw on the power, where do we put the meter?” Tesla never recovered... he moved from one New York hotel to another, leaving unpaid bills behind him, and spent his last days in parks feeding pigeons, even nursing injured ones back to health in his room. His life ended in solitude: a maid at the Hotel New Yorker found him dead in Room 3327. He was 86. Within days, the federal government ordered his belongings and papers to be seized, even though he was an American citizen, and an engineer was brought in to examine them. Whatever else Tesla left behind, the world has been arguing about it ever since...

The surreal beauty of Paris in 1902

Why did humans stop building like this?

This is real footage of California in the 40s

“The glory of our ancestors survives even through the flames.” Ernest Meissonier inscribed these words, in Latin, on this painting, which depicts what was left of the Tuileries Palace in Paris, home to French kings and to Napoleon, after it was deliberately set on fire in May 1871. A small group of men poured petroleum, tar and turpentine through its rooms, and in a single night, centuries of history went up in smoke. Meissonier began painting the ruins that same year. Through the blackened, roofless hall, you can still make out names carved high on the walls: Marengo and Austerlitz, the great victories of another age. The ruins stood for eleven years, a wound in the heart of Paris. Then in 1882 the government voted to tear them down, and by 1883 they were gone. The palace was never rebuilt. What took centuries to create had been erased in a few days of rage and a few months of demolition. It’s easy to destroy what we didn’t build ourselves. Meissonier understood that, and his inscription isn’t a cry of despair, but an act of defiance: buildings can burn, and palaces can fall, but as long as someone remembers what was lost, the fire never gets the final word...

When Michelangelo painted the Creation of Adam between 1508 and 1512, he may have hidden something inside it. Look at the red cloak surrounding God and the angels. In 1990, an American doctor named Frank Lynn Meshberger published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association arguing that its shape matches a cross-section of the human brain. The details are extraordinary: a fold in the cloak sits where the brain’s deep central fissure would be, an angel’s back takes the place of the brain stem, a strangely split foot lines up with the pituitary gland. Meshberger’s conclusion was simple: “Michelangelo portrays that what God is giving to Adam is the intellect.”

You know you’ve painted something special when your wife’s ex-husband calls it perfect... It’s Autumn Leaves, painted in 1855 by John Everett Millais. Four girls stand in a garden in Perth, Scotland, at the very end of the day, raking fallen leaves into a smoking pile. Behind them, the sky glows with that unmistakable light you only get on autumn evenings, just before the dark sets in. The two girls on the left were Alice and Sophie Gray, the younger sisters of Millais’s new wife, Effie. The two on the right were local girls she found to sit for him. According to Effie, Millais simply wanted a painting “full of beauty and without subject.” Many have read it as a meditation on the transience of youth, and Millais seems to have meant it that way: he later explained that he chose burning leaves because nothing else stirred that feeling of time slipping away quite like them. John Ruskin was the most powerful art critic in Britain at the time, a champion of Millais from his earliest days, and also Effie’s first husband. Their marriage had been annulled only the year before, and Effie had then married Millais. Yet when Ruskin saw this painting, he set all of that aside and praised it as “the first instance of a perfectly painted twilight.”

This photo of Nikola Tesla was taken in December 1899 in his laboratory in Colorado Springs, where he had gone to build one of the largest Tesla coils ever made, a machine he called the “magnifying transmitter.” It could produce something on the order of 12 million volts, and here it seems to fill the room with lightning, great bolts of electricity crackling through the air while Tesla sits beside it reading his notes. The photographer, Dickenson V. Alley, had been sent by The Century Magazine to take publicity pictures, and the image is a double exposure. First he photographed the machine firing in the darkened lab. Then, on the same plate, he photographed Tesla sitting in the chair with the power switched off. But what Tesla was really chasing in Colorado was far bigger than a photograph: he was trying to send power and messages without wires, and he later wrote that his mind was dominated by the idea of “effecting communication to any distance through the earth.”