Hasta La Gadget!

In May of 1976 in New York City, Roger Sharpe watched nervously as city council members piled into a Manhattan courtroom. Reporters and camera operators had already begun setting up, eagerly anticipating the proceedings ahead. Roger, a young magazine writer for GQ and the New York Times among others, did not expect this kind of attention. He knew lots of people, from bowling-alley-hanging teens to the Music & Amusement Association, were depending on him, but didn’t realize the whole country would be watching. Roger had been selected for this particular task not only for his knowledge and expertise, but for his legendary hand-eye coordination. He was there to prove that this was a game of skill, not chance. He was there to overturn the ban. He was there to save the game of pinball.

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What if you could capture the entire history of recorded human existence into one epic infographic for the ages? Crazy, right? Back in the 1930s, a man named John B. Sparks tried—and The Vault recently dug up his attempt. It’s called the Histomap, and it’s still incredible nearly 100 years later, if just slightly out of date.

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There are lots of interactions and fields around us all the time that we can’t see. Like gravity. We can always count on gravity to be there when we trip and face plant. And we interact with all different frequencies on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation every day, which is usually fine and sometimes deadly. And you might be feeling good about all this physical awareness, but don’t. People have known about this stuff for a long time and they’ve been making unbelievably detailed infographics about it for at least 70 years.

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While American women were restricted to administrative flying missions during wartime, more than a thousand Russian women flew combat missions. Valentina Grizodubova was one of them. Women had served in combat positions in the Soviet Union as early as World War I. Together, Russia and the surrounding countries were one country, known as the Soviet Union, from 1919 to 1991. Except for Turkey, which had one female military pilot in Sabiha Gokcen, the Soviet Union was the only country with women who flew in combat.

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Yesterday was the 44th anniversary of the first time humans set foot upon the Moon, when the Lunar Module of Apollo 11 landed on July 20th, 1969. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took plenty of stunning photos, and here are a few shots from angles you may not have seen before.

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