1. That little box that this man is holding is the nuclear core to Fat Man- the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.
2. This photo, of what looks like an ordinary ship at an ordinary dock on an ordinary day. It’s April 16, 1947, and that ship is SS Grandcamp. There is a fire in the hold, and the men on the dock are members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department, who are attempting to extinguish it.
SS Grandcamp’s cargo includes 2,200 tons of
ammonium nitrate.
A few minutes after this photo was taken, it’s going
to detonate
in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history, creating a
mushroom cloud more than 2,000 feet tall. All but one of the firefighters in
that photo are going to be instantly killed, and no identifiable fragment of
most of their bodies will ever be recovered. Nearly a thousand buildings in
Texas City are going to be flattened, and windows will be broken and
pedestrians knocked over by the force of the blast ten miles away in Galveston.
Steel shrapnel will be flung out at hypersonic speeds and fall from the sky in
molten chunks, igniting secondary fires all over the surrounding area,
including the various storage tanks of the local Monsanto chemical refinery and
another ship in the harbor, High Flyer, whose own 1,000 tons of
ammonium nitrate will detonate in turn.
At least 468 confirmed dead, more than 5,000 injured, and
more than $100 million in property damage (in 1947 dollars - over a billion in
today’s money).
3. Last photo of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Taken
moments before a suicide bomber, (wearing orange flowers, lower left, also on
the inset, top left) hugged him and detonated her bomb.
4. The person in this picture is named Tyler Hadley. He brutally beat his parents to death with a hammer. This picture was taken at a party he threw while his parent's bodies were still in the house.
The guy who called the police is actually the guy standing right next to him in this photo. Earlier that night, Tyler had confessed to him about the murders. It really makes the photo a whole lot stranger considering that the guy next to Tyler is probably thinking about calling the cops, or already had.
5. Tragedy by the Sea...Photo taken of a couple who just watched their 19 month
old son get carried away by the ocean waves. The child’s body was found later
that day a mile away.
6. The National Geographic Picture from 1987 is of the FIRST
heart transplant in Poland. It took 23 hours. The man holding the picture was the patient. He outlived the doctor who performed the
surgery.
The surgeon, Dr. Religa, is monitoring the patient's vitals
after the transplant while his assistant (the man in the top right corner) is
asleep on the floor from exhaustion. These guys were pioneers and medical
heroes. The original National Geographic picture from 1987 was voted picture of
the year.
7. This photo shows two brothers with their hair standing up
in the air like static. They were struck by lightning shortly after.
Miraculously, they both survived.
8. This picture of a happy little girl with her brand
new bike on Christmas morning 1996. It looks so normal and sweet. She had no
idea that later that night, she’d be brutally murdered right in that very house
and would become the center of one of the most infamous unsolved mysteries of
all time.
9. This photo of a Victorian girl with her parents. You’ll
notice how crisp and focused the girl is, whereas her parents are slightly
fuzzy from motion blur. This contrast makes the girl stand out and seem a bit
more vibrant and present for the photograph.
This is an example of Victorian post-mortem photography. The
young woman is captured in such sharp focus because she was dead and therefore
completely still, whereas the parents’ slight movements make them appear
somewhat blurry.
10. The car to the right would explode minutes later killing
29 people including a woman pregnant with twins. The Omagh bombing in Northern
Ireland the worst acts committed during "The Troubles"
11. Two of the kids with the finger guns in the top left are
the Columbine shooters.
12. This extremely mundane and uninteresting image is of
Japan Airlines Flight 123, where after a mechanical error out back had caused
it to blow off most of the vertical stabilizer. Only minutes later it would
crash, killing the majority of passengers on board and making it the deadliest
single plane accident in Aviation history.
13. This photo was the most expensive sold photograph
ever (until 2014), selling at $4.3 million.
14. John Lennon signing an autograph for Mark David Chapman
just hours before Chapman killed him. According to Chapman, he actually had the
gun in his pocket when this photo was taken.
15. This picture is actually taken at 3am, in the middle of the night. That is not the sun on the horizon, the lightning is so bright, it turned night into day.
16. A young American woman soaks in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub,
her muddy boots staining his bath mat, and an official portrait of the Fuehrer
sits on the tub’s edge.
The woman is Lee Miller, the only female combat photographer
in Europe during World War Two. She is pictured in Hitler’s Munich apartment on
April 30, 1945, by fellow war correspondent David Scherman.
“This was actually taken on the day that Hitler committed
suicide, although Lee Miller didn’t know that until after the event,” said
Hilary Roberts, research curator of photography at the museum, who put together
the show.
