The Actual Stories Behind Famous Historical Photos

Former schoolteacher Margaret Hamilton took a job as a software programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the late 1950s. Initially tasked with working on meteorological and defense-system software, Hamilton transitioned to aeronautical technology at the Instrumentation Laboratory at MIT (later called the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory) during the mid-1960s.

In 1965, Hamilton was appointed head of the team that would write and test software for the two computers on NASA's Apollo 11 mission - the Columbia (on the command module) and the Eagle (on the lunar module). With roughly 100 fellow software engineers, Hamilton incorporated protections into the software to prevent previous mistakes.

When a staff photographer took the picture of Hamilton with volumes of software information in 1969, it not only highlighted the pioneering technological achievement, but also emphasized the role of women in the process. Hamilton commented in 2019:

Programming was never considered to be women’s work, at least not in any of the many projects I have been involved with. Human computers [who did calculations by hand] were mostly all women and there were women who used calculating machines... but they weren’t programmers... Then within a couple of years there would be a few - and I did have some working for me - but not many. There were always many more men.

The defiant man who refused to salute while surrounded by Nazi loyalists, seen here in a 1936 photo, might be one of two people: August Landmesser or Gustav Wegert. Whoever the man is, he was present at the launch of a Horst Wessel, or naval training ship, on June 13.

If the man is Landmesser, his refusal to salute could indicate his personal circumstances and SS ideology. Landmesser joined the party in 1931, hoping it would help him find a job, but wanted to marry a Jewish woman, Irma Eckler, in 1935.

Race laws at the time prevented the nuptials, but Eckler and Landmesser continued their relationship. They had two daughters, Ingrid and Irene, and tried to flee Germany in 1938. Eckler was likely detained and sent to a concentration camp where she later perished. Landmesser was imprisoned and sent to fight on behalf of Germany. It's believed he died on the battlefield in Yugoslavia.

If the individual in the picture is Gustav Wegert, his life has some similarities Landmesser's. According to the Wegert family, Gustav was a metalworker at the Blohm & Voss shipbuilding factory in Hamburg, Germany. He, too, attended the launch of the Horst Wessel, but at no time in his life saluted the Third Reich. 

In the aftermath of not saluting in 1936, Wegert's wife expected her husband to be detained, but it never came about. Rather, Wegert was protected by his boss, who insisted Wegert was essential to production at the Blohm & Voss factory.

Unlike Landmesser, however, Wegert avoided imprisonment and was never forced to fight for Germany. Gustav Wegert passed in 1959.

Photographer Dorothea Lange chronicled the Great Depression while working with the Farm Security Administration. Lange, an agent of the New Deal, was tasked with bringing the plight of America's rural poor to light.

Her picture of Florence Owens Thompson, known as Migrant Mother, was one of seven images Lange took of the 32-year-old woman in Nipomo, CA. Thompson and her seven children lived at a pea-picking camp where, according to Lange, they were surviving on "frozen vegetables from the surrounding field and birds" felled by the children.

Overall, Lange's work - especially Migrant Mother - captures the struggle and strength of individuals living through the Depression. Thompson's expression highlights the concern she felt; the turned heads of the children reveal their dependence on their mother; and the dirty and frayed garments indicate multifaceted levels of despair. 

Paul Taylor, Lange's husband, marveled at how Lange would "saunter up to the people and look around, and then when she saw something that she wanted to photograph, to quietly take her camera, look at it, and if she saw that they objected, why, she would close it up and not take a photograph, or perhaps she would wait until... they were used to her."

One of the Thompson children, Katherine, later recalled Lange telling her mother that the picture would help others and that their names would not be used. When the picture was published in the newspaper, however, Katherine was "ashamed of it. We didn't want no one to know who we were."

The image of 11 men sitting on a beam high above New York City - not for the faint of heart if heights are a problem - captures hard work, ingenuity, and progress during the early 1930s. To take such a picture, the photographer must have been sitting at a similar vantage point - but the details of that remain unclear.

What is known, however, is that the beam in question is part of Rockefeller Center, the men are immigrants, and the height is estimated at about 850 feet.

The picture of the men eating, smoking, laughing, and dangling their legs was featured in the October 2 edition of The New York Herald-Tribune. It's been attributed to Charles Clyde Ebbets, Thomas Kelley, William Leftwich, and Lewis Hine. 

Just like the photographer itself, the names of the men have been unknown for decades. This changed during the early 2010s. After discovering a similar picture in a pub in Galway, Ireland, Seán Ó Cualáin and his brother, Eamonn, saw a note attached. It read: "This is my dad on the far right and my uncle-in-law on the far left."

They contacted the note-writer, Pat Glynn, immediately. When compared to the photo, Glynn family pictures indicate that Sonny Glynn (far right) and Matty O'Shaughnessy (far left) are both in the image.

German American photographer Arnold Genthe captured the negative effects of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, CA, within hours of it happening. To take one of his most famous photos, Genthe looked down Sacramento Street as one of the numerous fires raged in the city.

The earthquake hit at 5:13 am. For the next three or four days, San Francisco burned, with roughly 500 city blocks wiped out. The death toll from the earthquake and fires is estimated at about 3,000, with an additional 400,000 individuals left homeless.

Genthe, whose own studio was wiped out, borrowed a camera and traversed the city to document the ruins. Genthe later said of the Sacramento Street photo that it "shows, in a pictorially effective composition, the results of the earthquake, the beginning of the fire and the attitude of the people." He continued:

On the right is a house, the front of which had collapsed into the street. The occupants are sitting on chairs calmly watching the approach of the fire. Groups of people are standing in the street, motionless, gazing at the clouds of smoke. When the fire crept up close, they would just move up the block. It is hard to believe that such a scene actually occurred in the way the photograph represents it.

Lewis W. Hine's photographs have been credited with highlighting workplace changes, social inequities, and immigrant experiences in the United States during the early 20th century. Hine studied and taught sociology, incorporating his camera into work documenting immigrant arrivals at Ellis Island as early as 1904. He became the official photographer of the National Child Labor Committee in 1911, went to Europe with the Red Cross during WWI, and documented the building of the Empire State Building during the early 1930s.

Hine's Power House Mechanic Working on Steam Pump was taken in an unidentified location in 1920. As the muscular worker turns large bolts with his heavy wrench, the juxtaposition of massive machinery and human force takes center stage.

Hine's image is viewed as a statement about the importance of the worker himself in the face of expanding industrialization. The laborer is posed to reflect how machines define his work, but are nonetheless dependent upon him. In an increasingly mechanized environment where the worker was exploited and harmed, Hine explained, "I wanted to show the thing that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated."