Ozzy Ironing a Baby, 1983

Ozzy Osbourne ironing a baby in 1983 as photographed by Mark Weiss. Weiss was a photographer for Circus Magazine beginning in the late 1970s where he began photographing Rock music’s legends. He has photographed many popular album covers including several for Bon Jovi.

“That’s Ozzy with his daughter, Aimee, in 1984,” Weiss told The Rolling Stone. “That was a play off of his album, Diary of a Madman. It was for a Mother’s Day issue [of Faces magazine]. The idea was to dress him up like a mad housewife, you know, Diary of a Madman/Diary of a Mad Housewife.

“Aimee came in at the end of the shoot, and I said, “We have to throw her into the shot.” There are actually some photos of him ironing Aimee, too. And after it came out, people were like, “How could you do that?” I was like, “We didn’t do that. It was a prop. The kid is OK.” But me and Ozzy got a lot of attention for a lot of photo shoots we did.”

22 Curious Daguerreotypes of People Turn Their Backs to Camera

The daguerreotype was invented by Louis Daguerre (1787–1851), and it was the first commercial photographic process. A highly polished silver surface on a copper plate was sensitized to light by exposing it to iodine fumes. After exposing the plate in a camera it was developed with mercury vapor.

The invention revolutionized landscape photography. Portraits, however, were still a nuisance. Good luck getting kids to sit still for family photos, let alone convincing adults to stare motionlessly for 15 minutes. So, photographers set up some simple rules: No talking. No adjusting. No sneezing. And, just to be safe, no smiling.

By the 1840s, exposure times bobbed around 10 to 60 seconds, making personal photos much more feasible. Yet even then, heads sagged, backs slouched, and fingers fidgeted. Some professionals developed hidden neck braces that would lock the subject’s body into place.

It took decades for photography to become near instantaneous, and for “say cheese” to become part of popular culture. Here, a collection of 22 curious daguerreotypes of people turn their backs to camera for a photograph.

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Radiana – A Robot Built With Human Bones From the 1920s

Radiana was a “robot” or “automaton” employed by the magician Professor John Popjie, who toured in the 1920s and 1930s. Radiana could do some amazing things, like co-pilot a plane, drive a car, bake a cake, and even shave a brave member of the audience.

However, Radiana was no robot. In a version of the Golem illusion, there was a real person inside the automaton. The magician’s assistant was a small woman who used real hands to perform the feats while the audience was focused on Radiana’s face or Professor Popjie.

It would appear that Great-Aunt Kathleen – something of a ‘trouper’ – worked for one “Professor Popjie” who toured the world with his amazing “robot” Radiana. This supposed automaton would perform feats such as shaving willing audience members, apparently under Popjie’s control.

According to Great-Aunt Kathleen’s son, the pictures were taken around 1927 when Kath was 21. “She was small enough to fit inside the sphinx and manipulate the head, hands and legs.  She worked for Popjie for 3 years.  He proposed marriage to her – which was not accepted…”

Self Portrait as a Drowned Man: The First Hoax Photograph Ever Shot in 1840

The first hoax photograph was taken in 1840 by Hippolyte Bayard. Both Bayard and Louis Daguerre fought to claim the title “Father of Photography.” Bayard had supposedly developed his photography process before Daguerre introduced the daguerreotype. However, the announcement of the invention was held off, and Daguerre claimed the moment. In a rebellious move, Bayard produced this photograph of a drowned man claiming that he killed himself because of the feud.

François Arago, a friend of Daguerre, encouraged Bayard to delay the announcement of his photographic invention. Consequently, Bayard’s invention and contributions to photography were ignored, eclipsed by the celebrations surrounding the daguerreotype. In response to his alleged injustice, Bayard staged a portrait entitled Le Noyé (Self Portrait as a Drowned Man) in 1840. The portrait depicts the artist shirtless, slumped in a chair, his eyes closed to signal his recent demise. It was the first faked, staged portrait and was accompanied by a statement indicating Bayard’s turn to suicide because of the lack of recognition he received by the French government for his role in the invention of photography. And written on the image verso is a strange note:

“The corpse which you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process that has just been shown to you, or the wonderful results of which you will soon see. As far as I know, this inventive and indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with the perfection of his discovery. The Academy, the King, and all those who have seen his pictures admired them as you do at this very moment, although he himself considers them still imperfect. This has brought him much honor but not a single sou. The government, which has supported M. Daguerre more than is necessary, declared itself unable to do anything for M. Bayard, and the unhappy man threw himself into the water in despair. Oh, human fickleness! For a long time, artists, scientists, and the press took interest in him, but now that he has been lying in the morgue for days, no-one has recognized him or claimed him! Ladies and gentlemen, let’s talk of something else so that your sense of smell is not upset, for as you have probably noticed, the face and hands have already started to decompose.”

The note is signed by none other than the drowned man himself: “H.B. 18 October, 1840.”

Bayard’s contributions to photography remain largely unrecognized, but this early portrait is significant, showing the possibility to play with and manipulate the photographic portrait despite the apparent inherent truth presented in the medium.

As the first known example of a faked photograph, this image illustrates two qualities of photographs: first, that they can depict the world in a manner that closely mimics the way we see it. Second, that since their invention, they have been staged or altered in ways that remain consistent with the way we see. This consistency makes them all the more believable.

Portrait of Jacob C. Miller, a Civil War Veteran Who Lived With an Open Bullet Wound in His Forehead for Decades

Jacob C. Miller (August 4, 1840 - January 13, 1917) was a private in company K, 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment, and was wounded in the head near the Brock Field at the Battle of Chickamauga on the morning of September 19, 1863. The ball impacted in Miller’s head during the Civil War, but luckily the buck didn’t penetrate his skull.

Jacob Miller, after the Civil War.

Jacob Miller survived a bullet wound to the head during a battle in the Civil War. Miller wears his medal of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization formed after the war for Union veterans.

His firsthand account of the battle was published by The Joliet Daily News in 1911.

“When I came to my senses some time after I found I was in the rear of the confederate line. So not to become a prisoner I made up my mind to make an effort to get around their line and back on my own side. I got up with the help of my gun as a staff, then went back some distance, then started parallel with the line of battle. I suppose I was so covered with blood that those that I met, did not notice that I was a Yank, (at least our Major, my former captain did not recognize me when I met him after passing to our own side)...

“The wound never really healed, but it’s pretty safe to assume it saved his life. What happened next?

I suffered for nine months then I got a furlough home to Logansport and got Drs. Fitch and Colman to operate on my wound. They took out the musket ball. After the operation a few days, I returned to the hospital at Madison and stayed there till the expiration of my enlistment, Sept. 17, 1864. Seventeen years after I was wounded a buck shot dropped out of my wound and thirty one years after two pieces of lead came out...

“Some ask how it is I can describe so minutely my getting wounded and getting off the battle field after so many years. My answer is I have an everyday reminder of it in my wound and constant pain in the head, never free of it while not asleep. The whole scene is imprinted on my brain as with a steel engraving. I haven’t written this to complain of any one being in fault for my misfortune and suffering all these years, the government is good to me and gives me $40.00 per month pension.”

Bettie Page and the Iconic Cheetah Pinups: Here’s the Story Behind the Famous Photos Taken by Bunny Yeager in 1954

In 1954, during one of her annual pilgrimages to Miami, Florida, Bettie Page met photographers Jan Caldwell, H. W. Hannau and Bunny Yeager. At that time, Page was the top pin-up model in New York. Yeager, a former model and aspiring photographer, signed Page for a photo session at the now-closed wildlife park Africa USA in Boca Raton, Florida.

The photographs from this photo shoot are among her most celebrated. They include nude shots with a pair of cheetahs named Mojah and Mbili. The leopard skin patterned Jungle Girl outfit she wore was made, along with much of her lingerie, by Page herself.

The night before the shoot, Bettie finished sewing the leopard-print one-piece that she wore in the photographs. It had an off-the-shoulder Tarzan look, a triangle front flap, and five thin ties up the side. She examined the fit of the suit in the mirror and then took it off to practice modeling naked.

Bettie heard a scratching sound at the window. At first she thought it was the wind, then she recognized the sound of the screen latches unhooking. She grabbed her robe and turned out the light. “I’ll give you two seconds to get away from this window or I’ll blow your brains out!” Shouted Bettie.

Fortunately, the intruder fled. She called a night watchman who came over, replaced the screens and sat on her porch all night. Despite this, Bettie couldn’t sleep. She called Bunny the next morning to cancel the shoot. “I look like I’ve been on a big drunk,” Bettie warned. “I have big bags under my eyes.”

Bunny insisted that she had already arranged for the location and picked Bettie up at 7:30 the next morning. At the Safari Park, Bettie posed hanging from the trees, near a waterfall, and with animals, including zebras, ostriches, camels and a chimpanzee.

If you look closely at several of the images from the photo shoot, the eyes on both of the cheetahs look glassy. The trainer introduced Bettie to the pair, named Moja and Mbili, (meaning one and two in Swahili.) He told her to be sure and hang onto their chains because they would be hard to catch. He also said that the cheetahs were ill and had been up most of the night.

“The cheetahs didn’t look well either. I felt a little uneasy; I thought they might take it out on me. But I think the worst thing that happened was that they licked me,” recalled Bettie.

Bettie and the cheetahs came through and Bunny Yeager took some of her most fabulous images of Page that day.

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Philip Garner – Half Suit, 1982

Phillip Garner destabilized this naturalness in his comic photograph of the ‘half-suit’: “The suit helps to create an illusion of a hard, or at least a firm and ‘proper’, body that is autonomous, in control, rational and masculine. It gives the impression that bodily boundaries continually remain intact and reduce potential embarrassment caused by any kind of leakage.

“When bodies are draped in soft, light fabrics it is often possible to see the boundaries of the body – the rise and fall of the chest, mound of the breast, contour of the muscle. It is possible to see a spot of blood, a smear of dirt, a piece of flesh. Such matter signifies a body that cannot be neatly contained, a body that is not always rational and in control, a body that is both desirable and disgusting.”

He claimed that “the ‘half-suit’ retains the crisp formality established in the neck/collar/tie /lapel area but offers an abbreviated midsection for comfort and physical.” It is the absurdity the makes the photograph work as comic.

Riding a Pig in the Early 20th Century

In the early 20th century, getting drunk and riding a pig was considered one of the most extreme sports known to man.

In the 1920s, People Thought Radioactive Water Was Good for the Health

Back in the 1920s, people thought that drinking radium, and thorium, infused water was healthy. One of the more famous varieties of this water was sold under the brand name Radithor. It was eventually famously implicated in the illness and subsequent death of an industrialist named Eben Byers, which was accompanied by the headline of “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off”.

A bottle of Radithor at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in New Mexico, USA.

Radithor was a well known patent medicine/snake oil that is possibly the best known example of radioactive quackery. It consisted of triple distilled water containing at a minimum 1 microcurie (37 kBq) each of the Radium 226 and 228 isotopes, as well as 1 microcurie of isothiouranium, a cheaper radioactive compound.

Radithor was manufactured from 1918-28 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, Inc., of East Orange, New Jersey. The head of the laboratories was listed as Dr. William J. A. Bailey, not a medical doctor. It was advertised as “A Cure for the Living Dead” as well as “Perpetual Sunshine”.

These radium elixirs were marketed similar to the way opiates were commonly advertised with Laudanum an age earlier, and electrical cure-alls during the same time period such as the Prostate Warmer.

The story of socialite Eben Byers’s death from Radithor consumption and the associated radiation poisoning found its way into the New York Times under the title “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off,” which led to the strengthening of the Food and Drug Administration's powers and the demise of most radiation quack cures.

The Radium Girls: The Living Dead Women in the 1920s

The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with self-luminous paint.

From 1917 to 1926, U.S. Radium Corporation, originally called the Radium Luminous Material Corporation, was engaged in the extraction and purification of radium from carnotite ore to produce luminous paints, which were marketed under the brand name “Undark”. The ore was mined from the Paradox Valley in Colorado and other “Undark mines” in Utah. As a defense contractor, U.S. Radium was a major supplier of radioluminescent watches to the military. Their plant in Orange, New Jersey, employed as many as three hundred workers, mainly women, to paint radium-lit watch faces and instruments, misleading them that it was safe.

Radium Girls work in a factory of the United States Radium Corporation, circa 1922. All women or girls using radium paint with no protection or warnings.

U.S. Radium Corporation hired approximately 70 women to perform various tasks including handling radium, while the owners and the scientists familiar with the effects of radium carefully avoided any exposure to it themselves; chemists at the plant used lead screens, masks and tongs. U.S. Radium had distributed literature to the medical community describing the “injurious effects” of radium. In spite of this knowledge, a number of similar deaths had occurred by 1925, including the company’s chief chemist, Dr. Edwin E. Leman, and several female workers. The similar circumstances of their deaths prompted investigations to be undertaken by Dr. Harrison Martland, County Physician of Newark.

An estimated 4,000 workers were hired by corporations in the U.S. and Canada to paint watch faces with radium. At USRC, each of the painters mixed her own paint in a small crucible, and then used camel hair brushes to apply the glowing paint onto dials. The then-current rate of pay, for painting 250 dials a day, was about a penny and a half per dial (equivalent to $0.303 in 2020). The brushes would lose shape after a few strokes, so the U.S. Radium supervisors encouraged their workers to point the brushes with their lips, or use their tongues to keep them sharp. Because the true nature of the radium had been kept from them, the Radium Girls painted their nails, teeth, and faces for fun with the deadly paint produced at the factory. Many of the workers became sick; it is unknown how many died from exposure to radiation.

Women painting alarm clock faces with radium in 1932, Ingersoll factory, January 1932. Workers would often lick the paintbrush to achieve a finer point — directly ingesting the radium. (Daily Herald Archive/SSPL/Getty Images)

Among the first to see numerous problems among dial painters were dentists. Dental pain, loose teeth, lesions and ulcers, and the failure of tooth extractions to heal were some of these conditions. Many of the women later began to suffer from anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw, a condition now known as radium jaw. The women also suffered from suppression of menstruation, and sterility. It is thought that the X-ray machines used by the medical investigators may have contributed to some of the sickened workers’ ill-health by subjecting them to additional radiation. It turned out at least one of the examinations was a ruse, part of a campaign of disinformation started by the defense contractor. U.S. Radium and other watch-dial companies rejected claims that the afflicted workers were suffering from exposure to radium. For some time, doctors, dentists, and researchers complied with requests from the companies not to release their data.

In 1923, the first dial painter died, and before her death, her jaw fell away from her skull. By 1924, 50 women who had worked at the plant were ill, and a dozen had died. At the urging of the companies, worker deaths were attributed by medical professionals to other causes. Syphilis, a notorious sexually transmitted infection at the time, was often cited in attempts to smear the reputations of the women.

Charlotte Purcell, one of the painters, demonstrates the lip-pointing technique that they used to get the brushes to a fine point. (Chicago Daily Times)

Front and side views of a dial painter with a radium-induced sarcoma of the chin. (Collection of Ross Mullner)

“‘Living Death’ Victims,” The Times-News (Hendersonville, NC), February 14, 1938.

The inventor of radium dial paint, Dr Sabin A. Von Sochocky, died in November 1928, becoming the 16th known victim of poisoning by radium dial paint. He had gotten sick from radium in his hands, not the jaw, but the circumstances of his death helped the Radium Girls in court.

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Cannabis Rights Activist Ben Masel Smoking a Joint While Voting in the 1976 Presidential Election

Cannabis and political rights activist Ben Masel smoking a joint while casting a ballot in the 1976 President election.

A federal law that prohibits arrest while in a voting booth allowed Masel to enter, light up, smoke a joint, eat the evidence, vote for president and leave unmolested while polling officials looked on helplessly. Masel held the world’s record for political arrests: 46.

Scalped in 1867 by Cheyenne in Nebraska, Here’s the Story Behind William Thompson’s Scalp

Scalping is often depicted in old-timey cowboy-and-Indian movies with lots of quavering music and dramatic pauses. But then you see the real scalp under a bell jar and it isn’t so melodramatic anymore.

William Thompson’s scalp, archived at the Main Library in Omaha, Nebraska, looks more like some sort of rodent than an impactful part of history. However, Thompson’s story—surviving a scalping, holding on to the coiffure in question—makes it all the more remarkable.

On a hot and muggy evening in August of 1867, as the railroad was being built. Union Pacific officials realized they were not getting any telegraph feed west of the Plum Creek Station. Four railroad telegraph workers and a foreman went to Plum Creek Station, which later evolved into the city of Lexington. They arrived on a handcar. They came around a curve and ran into a bunch of railroad ties. The handcar was derailed. At this time, there were 25 Cheyenne warriors that were waiting in ambush, and they came down and attacked the repair party. Working on the railroad was a dangerous job.

William Thompson was a victim in the attack. He suffered a wound to the upper arm, and one of the Cheyenne braves scalped him. He was awake, and alive at the time. There is much debate on how he managed to stay quiet, but apparently he did.

Earlier in the day, another train left Omaha. It arrived after the attack, and it ran into the same bunch of railroad ties as the handcar. That derailed the entire train, 17 cars, the engineer, the fireman, the conductor were killed, and it was the first successful derailment of an entire train by a Native American tribe in U.S. history.

Then UP realized they had a serious issue. They sent out a second rescue train the next day. They rescued Thompson who was quite a sight at that time. Infection had started to set in, but he was alive, and they took him back to Omaha where they tried to re-attach the scalp. Dr. Richard Moore tried to do that in August of 1867, but they were unsuccessful. But the doctor did believe Mr. Thompson was a strong individual, and he would survive the infection, which he did.

Thompson was from England and he hung on to the scalp. His fellow countrymen were not as enamored with the scalp as he was. Thompson donated his scalp to the doctor who had tried to help him. He did decide to donate it to Dr. Moore in 1900. Dr. Moore then decided to donate it to the Omaha Public Library since he assumed the local interest would be piqued.

The scalp is now kept in an acid-free box at the W. Dale Clark Library in Omaha. It’s always handled carefully with gloves. It’s been the subject of some several national TV shows, and people often request to see it.

(The original story was told by Lynn Sullivan, a library specialist at the W. Dale Clark Library in Omaha, via KOLN)

Vintage Photographs of Lana Wood With Her Leopard in the 1960s

Lana Wood is a Hollywood pseudonym for the Russian actress Svetlana Nikolaevna Zakharenko, the younger sister of Natalie Wood. Lana’s best-known role is as Bond girl Plenty O’Toole in the 1971 film Diamonds are Forever.

In her early career, Wood usually played in films in which Natalie appeared. Starting in the 1960s, her own career took off. After appearing on the short-lived drama series The Long, Hot Summer, she landed the role of Sandy Webber on the soap series Peyton Place. She played the role from 1966–67.

In 1970, Wood was approached by Hugh Hefner and she agreed to pose for Playboy. The Playboy pictures appeared in the April 1971 issue, along with Wood’s poetry.

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