The Thing aka the Great Seal Bug. On 4th August, 1945, a group of Soviet school children presented to W. Averell Harriman (The US Ambassador to the USSR) with a carved US Seal as gesture of friendship. It hung in his office for 7 years before discovering it contained a listening device.
It was a remarkable spying device for the time.
A fully passive listening device, no power supply, no active electronic component, and no need for the Soviets to ever get in the room it was in to recover recordings.
It activates only when a specific radio signal is beamed at it (which can be done from outside the building where it is placed), and transmits back the conversations it’s picking up.
Warsaw Uprising: Civilians running to get water from the pump under fire, barricade at the corner of Krucza Street and Piusa Street. Photo by Jerzy Beeger, 1944.
Teenagers dressed for a high school dance in the 1920s
A German cavalryman gazes upon an early airplane in Johannisthal Airfield near Berlin, 1910
President Kennedy leaving Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Texas, one day before his assassination. (1963)
Judy Garland at age 46 in Copenhagen, March 1969. 3 months before her death.
In 1949, bedridden French artist Henri Matisse used a long bamboo stick with charcoal to sketch designs on his bedroom wall for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.
The Royal Executioner of Rewah (India) from 1903.
In the Late 1800s, Scientists Believed Zebras Could Replace Horses—But After Decades of Training, Crossbreeding, and Failed Experiments, Their Wild Nature Proved Impossible to Tame
Estelle Peck was one of the only white individuals imprisoned in the Japanese Internment Camps. When her husband Arthur Ishigo was forcibly sent to one of these camps, she went with him voluntarily and was also incarcerated. She was later the subject of an Oscar-winning documenary
“A devil’s concert,” was how an eyewitness described the destruction of Hamburg following Operation Gomorrah in July 1943. This photograph, taken after Victory in Europe Day in 1945, captures the skeletal remains left behind.
John Jacob Astor IV was the wealthiest passenger on the Titanic. He helped his pregnant wife into a lifeboat, followed the ‘women and children first’ protocol, stayed behind and died in the sinking
Elevator garages in Chicago, circa 1930s.
Den Fujita, founder of Mcdonalds Japan in 1986. He believed eating McDonald’s would turn Japanese people white
Mugshot of 18 year old future Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, 1936. Ceasescu had been arrested for “communist agitation.”
Emperor Hirohito walking through the ruined streets of Tokyo after an American firebombing raid on the city (10 March, 1945)
The violent repression of a march led by Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. (March 28, 1968)
Lady working as a mechanic in Philadelphia during the WWII, Pennsylvania. June of (1943)
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