In September 1976, photographer Martin Elliott captured a rear shot of 18-year-old Fiona Butler, his girlfriend, holding a tennis racket and scratching her buttocks on a tennis court at the University of Birmingham. The dress was handmade by Butler’s friend Carol Knotts, who also provided the racket, while the shoes were borrowed from Butler’s father, and the tennis balls were her family’s dog’s toys.

On the evening of August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos, a crater lake in northwest Cameroon, released a massive cloud of carbon dioxide. The gas, heavier than air, flowed silently and invisibly down into nearby valleys, spreading up to 25 kilometers away.

In 1982, 10-year-old Samantha Smith from Maine wrote a letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, asking if he intended to start a war. Her letter was published in a Soviet newspaper, prompting Andropov to invite Samantha and her family to visit the U.S.S.R. in 1983. She accepted, traveling as “America’s Youngest Ambassador.”

n 1944, 23-year-old Elinor Powell, a U.S. Army Nurse Corps officer, was refused service at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Phoenix due to her skin color. Angered, she returned to her station at Camp Florence, Arizona, where she was tasked with caring for German POWs—men fighting for a regime of white supremacy.

In 1930, long before GPS technology, the Iter Avto was invented in Italy as the first-ever onboard navigation system. This mechanical device, designed for cars, used paper maps wound on scrolls. As the car moved, the device, connected to the vehicle’s speedometer, would scroll through the maps, showing the driver the route ahead.

In the dense forests of Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan, a curious phenomenon has caught the eye of scientists and tourists alike: perfect circles of trees. Seen from above, these formations create striking concentric rings that seem almost too precise to be natural.

In 1945, Angie Nanni, a Pennsylvania woman with a knack for numbers, took a math test at a secret government facility in Arlington, Virginia. The test involved “non-carrying” subtraction, a concept she had never encountered before. But Angie’s natural aptitude led her to finish the test first, catching the attention of her supervisors. She had just passed the first hurdle to join a top-secret code-breaking project.

Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant, worked as a cook in New York in the early 1900s. Although she showed no symptoms, Mallon was a carrier of typhoid fever. Between 1900 and 1907, she unknowingly infected at least 22 people in various households where she worked, causing several deaths.

Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish Jew, was living in Paris in 1938 after fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany. His parents, along with thousands of other Polish Jews, had been forcibly deported from Germany to Poland, where they were left stranded at the border in dire conditions.

In the late 19th century, a widespread fear gripped Britain and America: the idea that books could transmit deadly diseases. This fear became known as “The Great Book Scare.” Medical professionals and public health officials warned that germs could linger on the pages of library books, spreading infections like tuberculosis and smallpox.