Posts tagged with ‘1800s’

Results from America’s first sex survey, from 1890

The woman above is Clelia Duel Mosher, the first person to do a survey of the sexual habits of American women. From 1890 to 1920, she did periodic interviews with 45 women, asking them questions that women of the time didn’t dare to talk about in public. The results were never published anywhere, and Mosher’s work wasn’t discovered until 1973, shedding light on a period of time when women didn’t talk about sex and didn’t admit to enjoying it.

Read more »

Siberian bear hunting suit from the 1800s turns you into a human blowfish of pain

Most likely used for bear baiting, this imposing suit is made of thick leather, studded with dozens of nails held in place by more leather. One poke and any bear is going to know you’re not to be fucked with.

It consists of leather pants and jacket (and an iron helmet) studded all over with 1-inch iron nails about 3/4 in. apart. The nails are held in place by a second layer of leather lining the whole thing and quilted into place between the nails.

Via

The oldest known record re-created from a single printed photograph

Patrick Feaster, a sound historian at Indiana University specializes in bringing really old audio recordings back to life. His latest feat was bringing back an audio recording from around 1889 recorded by Emile Berliner. The record no longer exists, but Feaster was able to reconstruct the record using nothing but an old photograph of the record from 1890.

Read more »

Everything you’ve wanted to know about the etiquette of taking a crap at the opera in the early 1800s

These days, theaters of all kinds come equipped with clean and (mostly) sanitary restrooms for everyone’s convenience. In 1830s London however, people were not so lucky. So what exactly did you do in 1830 if you were at a play or opera and really had to evacuate that turtle head? Some guy wrote a book about the subject, in case you were wondering.

Read more »

Photographs of street life in 1870s Victorian London

In the late 1800s in London, as in most growing industrial and urban centers of the time, life was rough. Rural farm life is rough, but life in a growing urban area is difficult in a very different fashion. Poverty, disease, homelessness, swindles, lies, alcoholism, gambling and other vices, cramped quarters and trying to make a living present whole new challenges than milking the cows and plowing the fields.

Read more »

The weirdest map of North America ever printed is this 19th century giant meat man

In the late 1800s, merchants in the city of Superior, Wisconsin needed a way to convince other companies their town deserved to be a national center of manufacturing and shipping. To promote this idea, the Superior business interests created this rare map of a skinless, naked giant covering a good chunk of North America.

Read more »

One man’s quest to create the perfect smile through electrocution

Back in the 19th century, people were keen on all sorts of crazy fucking medical experimentation. One man, Guillaume Duchenne, was obsessed with finding the perfect smile. And his method to find the perfect smile involved using electricity to shock various parts of the face, from people of all ages and walks of life, in order to force them to smile.

Read more »

Music on your phone? That’s soooo 1890s

We think we’re all sorts of hot shit these days because we can pull out our phone and listen to music, but people have been trying to pair telephones and music ever since the telephone was invented. 

Read more »

Harvard entrance exam from 1899 will make you feel like a complete moron

A lot of colleges have been dumbed down a bit over the years, but if you were a student in 1899 trying to get into Harvard, you would have had to pass the following entrance exam, recently uncovered by the New York Times. And you’d better hope that you have a solid foundation in the classics, since education in the late 1800s was built on studying lots and lots of Greek and Latin and their respective histories.

Read more »

Photos from 1880s frontier Colorado

Between 1887 and 1892, John C.H. Grabill sent 188 photographs to the Library of Congress for copyright protection. Grabill is known as a western photographer, documenting many aspects of frontier life – hunting, mining, western town landscapes and white settlers’ relationships with Native Americans. Most of his work is centered on Deadwood in the late 1880s and 1890s. He is most often sited for his photographs in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Read more »