40 Cool Photos of the 1950s Young Couples

Fashion in the 1950s saw a clear gender divide. While men and boy’s fashion moved towards a more casual day-to-day style, women and girl’s fashion prioritized elegance, formality, and perfectly matched accessories.

Couture womenswear saw rapid change with new designers such as Cristobal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy disrupting the overtly feminine silhouette popularized by Christian Dior while novel prints and colors marked a playfulness in fashion for both men and women.

The 1950s was fundamentally a time of conformity.

Take a look at these cool vintage photos to see what young couples looked like in the 1950s.

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January 26, 1932: Winston Churchill’s Doctors Note Allowing Him to Drink Unlimited Alcohol While Visiting USA During Prohibition

While visiting New York on December 13, 1931, Winston Churchill made the classic mistake of an Englishman in America and looked the wrong way when stepping out of a cab. He was hit by an oncoming car, requiring a trip to the hospital, and a postponement of his lecture tour.

The letter basically says Churchill can drink as much as he wants, whenever he wants.

He was rushed to Lenox Hill hospital, where he was treated for a fractured nose, fractured ribs, and a wound to the head. In the absence of alcohol, he asked the aesthetician for “chloroform or something.” Though he was seriously ill, he didn’t lose his sense of humor. “They almost got me that time, Thompson,” he told his detective.

“In England we frequently cross roads along which fast traffic is moving in both directions,” Churchill later said in an article for the Daily Mail. “I did not think the task I set myself now either difficult or rash. But at this moment habit played me a deadly trick. I no sooner got out of the cab somewhere about the middle of the road and told the driver to wait than I instinctively turned my eyes to the left. About 200 yards away were the yellow headlights of an approaching car. I thought I had just time to cross the road before it arrived; and I started to do so in the prepossession—wholly unwarranted—that my only dangers were from the left.”

He took the whole of January off to recover in the Bahamas, where he recuperated “by sea and sunbathing, massage, and other aids.”

In February, he returned to America to continue the lecture series that he had to cancel due to the accident, but this time, he came prepared with a doctor’s note that would enable him to receive his preferred medicine whenever he liked. Churchill’s American doctor, Otto C. Pickhardt, prescribed the British statesman “the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times.” Adding that “the quantity is naturally indefinite but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters.” That’s a bit more than 8 ounces per day.

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill is known for many things: his witty comebacks, his rousing speeches, and leading Britain through World War II. But he’s also known as a man who really liked to drink, so much so that there’s some debate among historians about whether or not he was an alcoholic.

He started his mornings off with a “daily whiskey mouthwash” and continued drinking it throughout the day, his favorite being Johnny Walker Red Label. At lunch, he often enjoyed a bottle of champagne, preferably a Pol Roger served at a specific temperature. He capped his evenings off with a fine brandy. His capacity for booze was so bottomless that when he visited the White House, the staffers there would refer to it as “Winston Hours,” as his drinking habits would put Roosevelt out of commission for a few days. As Churchill himself once said, “I’ve gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

30 Fascinating Photos of a Young Eddie Van Halen Posing With His Guitars From the Late 1970s and 1980s

One of the most influential guitarists of the modern age, Eddie Van Halen was known for his mastery of the two-handed tapping technique and for bringing the virtuosic rock guitar solo back into the popular music mainstream in the late 1970s and 1980s.

“I’m not the typical guitar collector in the least,” Van Halen told Guitar Aficionado Magazine in 2014. “I’ve bought a lot of vintage pieces over the years, but I’ve destroyed quite a few of them. People might think, How could you desecrate the Mona Lisa? But I really don’t care what something looks like.

“I’m more concerned with a guitar’s functionality, sound and playability. That’s why I started building my own guitars. Other guitars wouldn’t do what I needed them to do, so I made my own.”

The joy he conveyed onstage with guitar in hand was genuine and profound. But there were also darker currents in his emotional life he couldn’t express in words, even to those closest to him. He avoided the ups and downs of high school social life, and sometimes school itself, by holing up in his bedroom with his guitar and a six-pack. He went on to spend a good portion of his life in that realm of pure music, retreating into endless, meditative, alcohol-fueled jams in hotel rooms or in his studio. “It’s the universal vibration,” he told the Rolling Stone in 2007. “It heals.”

“When he played,” his ex-wife Valerie Bertinelli wrote, “he disappeared into a world that was his. There he was most comfortable, and whatever he shared was of his own choosing. This interior world would confound, anger, and frustrate me to no end later on, but early on it was seductive.”

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The Story Behind the World’s First Underwater Photograph Taken by William Thompson in 1856

In 1856, William Thompson took the world’s first underwater photo in the Bay of Weymouth in Dorset, UK. The camera inside a housing made of wood and iron was mounted on a tripod that was lowered to a depth of 5.5 m (18 ft) by means of a rope.

First underwater photograph taken on a wet colloidion plate in 1856 by William Thompson.

Thompson got the idea while watching a wave-battered bridge from a public house. He used the collodion process to take the single photo. Total exposure time was 10 minutes during which the camera flooded. The plate was removed and rinsed in freshwater but it still produced a weak underwater photo of the bay.

Although the image was by no means a masterpiece, it was nonetheless a technical success. The world’s first underwater photo was also the first half & half image (split shot, over-under). No other attempts were made until Frenchman Louis Boutan’s experiments in 1893.

With Thompson, to think was to act. He already owned a camera which he was in the habit of using in conjunction with his natural history studies. A carpenter now made him a wooden box large enough to contain the camera. The front of the box was made of plate glass and on the outside of the front there was a heavily weighted shutter, hinged at the top, that could be raised by a long string attached to it. Thumbscrews secured the back of the box so that when the camera had been placed in it, it could be made (Thompson hoped) reasonably watertight. The box was fitted on an iron tripod and provided with a rope for lowering it into the sea and pulling it up again.

So far, so good. The box was ready. The next problem concerned the camera itself. Thompson's camera took a plate measuring 5 inches by 4 inches, which he prepared using the collodion process. This meant that the liquid chemical had to be poured on to the plate, and be exposed and developed all within a matter of an hour or so. Following the procedure usual at the time, Thompson set up a small tent, on Weymouth beach, and inside it prepared a plate and put it in his camera. He then, under cover of a black cloth, placed the camera in the box, making sure that its lens was against the plate glass, and screwed on the back.

The next step was to lower the box into the sea. For the site of his experiment Thompson chose what he described as “a nook in the bay of Weymouth which is bounded by a ridge of rocks (where the area within is of sand and boulders and thickly clothed with many species of seaweeds.”

Thompson and his friend Kenyon, having rowed out a sufficient distance from the beach, lowered the box into 18 feet of water. When he was sure that the apparatus was standing upright on the bottom, he pulled the string that raised the hinged shutter. Thompson made two attempts that day. For the first he allowed an exposure time of five minutes but found that the plate having been developed registered nothing.

For his second attempt he doubled the exposure time. Although by then the light had deteriorated, he obtained a reasonable satisfactory negative, from which he made a print on which it was possible faintly to discern the outlines of boulders and seaweed. Water had leaked into the camera but this, Thompson was pleased to see, had not seriously affected the quality of the picture. He also noted with surprise that the image had not been inverted, and came to the conclusion that the thick plate glass in front of the lens must have acted as a reversing mirror.

Thompson later designed a better apparatus, but he then lost interest and pursued the matter no further. His friend William Penney of Poole, who was a chemist, and a naturalist of some note, persuaded him to send an account of his experiment to be printed in the Journal of the Society of Arts, otherwise there would probably have been no record of it in existence today.

Although Thompson often used his camera to take still life photographs of fishes and other marine subjects that he had dredged from the bay, he thought of underwater photography only as a useful aid in underwater engineering. It is clear that he never imagined a time when future generations might be able to use a similar process to take photographs of marine life in situ. Yet some of the finest examples of underwater photographs have been taken in recent years along the Dorset coast within a few miles of the spot where, in 1856, Thompson lowered his camera into the water in a nook in Weymouth Bay.

(via British Society of Underwater Photographers)

Life in the Past Through Stunning Color Photos Captured by Fred Herzog

Fred Herzog was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1930. Losing both his parents during and after the war, he immigrated to Canada in 1952 and settled in Vancouver the following year. Herzog studied photography magazines while working for the CPR steamship line and later was employed as a medical photographer. By day he earned his living at UBC, on evenings and in his spare time he walked through Vancouver with his camera, observed and documented the daily life and soul of the city.

Family, 1958.

Throughout his career, Herzog produced a considerable amount of colour photographs, focusing on urban life, storefronts, second-hand shops, neon signs, billboards, vacant lots, cafes and crowds of people who have populated the streets over the years. Herzog’s use of colour was unusual in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a time when fine art photography was particularly associated with black-and-white imagery. Furthermore, Herzog was known to photograph almost solely with Kodachrome slide film, which was very much difficult to print. It was not until the mid-seventies that printing technology eventually caught up, allowing him to make archival pigment prints that matched the colour and intensity of the Kodachrome film.

Take a look through 35 stunning vintage color photographs below: 

My room, Harwood Street, 1958.

Two men in fog, 1958.

Reader spruce, 1959.

U R Next, 1959.

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30 Beautiful Photos of American Actress Andrea Leeds in the 1930s

Born 1914 as Antoinette Lees in Butte, Montana, American actress Andrea Leeds began her film career in 1933 playing bit parts and using her given name. As Andrea Leeds, she played her first substantial role in the film Come and Get It (1936) and achieved another success with her next film It Could Happen to You! (1937).

A popular supporting player of the late 1930s, Leeds was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Stage Door (1937). She read for the role of Melanie in Gone with the Wind; however the role was given to Olivia de Havilland.

Leeds was progressing to leading roles, when she retired from acting following her marriage in 1939, and was later a successful horse breeder. She died from cancer in 1984 in Palm Springs, California at the age of 69. A resident of the city for many years, a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars was dedicated to her in 1994.

Take a look at these beautiful photos to see portrait of a young Andrea Leeds in the 1930s.

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American Classic Bombshell: 35 Glamorous Photos of Kathleen Hughes in the 1950s

Born 1928 as Elizabeth Margaret von Gerkan in Hollywood, California, American actress Kathleen Hughes was discovered in a Little Theater production in 1948. Signed to a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox, she made 14 films for the studio, and appeared in five motion pictures for Universal Studios, including the cult film It Came From Outer Space (1953).

By 1956, Hughes was appearing in television series. She played in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1956–1957), Telephone Time (1956), The Bob Cummings Show (1958), The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, 77 Sunset Strip (1959), Hotel de Paree (1959), Tightrope (1959), General Electric Theater (1960–1962), The Tall Man (1961), Bachelor Father (1962), Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (1965), and I Dream of Jeannie (1967).

In 1962, Hughes played the role of murder victim Lita Krail in the sixth-season 1962 episode of Perry Mason, entitled “The Case of the Double-Entry Mind”. She played the recurring role of Mrs. Coburn on the television series The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. She appeared on M*A*S*H as Lorraine Blake, wife of unit commander Henry Blake, in a home movie she sent to him. Hughes portrayed Mitch, a secretary, on the NBC drama Bracken’s World (1969–1971).

Take a look at these glamorous photos to see the beauty of young Kathleen Hughes in the 1950s.

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