From the reading desk
The archive
Historical pictures, their stories, and the original records behind them. Read freely, or choose an investigation before you open its explanation.
43 stories · page 2 of 2
Photography and archival custody · 1868–1871 / 1981
John Thomson travelled through China between 1868 and 1872, photographing streets, landscapes and people for audiences who would usually encounter them in print. Working with wet-collodion glass negatives meant carrying fragile equipment and preparing plates near the place of exposure. The tea-house view comes from Hong Kong during those journeys. Its later history is almost another journey: the negatives entered Henry Wellcome’s collection in 1921, and a contact print was made in 1981. The scene, the glass negative and the later sheet of photographic paper each have their own date.
Public health · 1850s
In late summer 1854, cholera struck the streets around Broad Street in Soho. John Snow investigated where people had died and where they obtained drinking water. His argument challenged explanations that blamed unhealthy air alone. The familiar map was published in his 1855 account: short black bars accumulate beside affected addresses, while nearby pumps offer possible sources of exposure. Snow also used interviews and comparisons beyond this neighbourhood. The map mattered because it made a local pattern visible; the investigation mattered because it asked how that pattern had come about.
Geology · 1810s
William Smith learned to follow layers of rock while working as a surveyor and canal engineer. Fossils helped him recognise corresponding strata even when the same layers appeared far apart. In 1815 he published a large geological map of England, Wales and part of Scotland, with John Cary as its publisher. Its sweeping colours describe a country beneath familiar county boundaries: bands of chalk, clay, limestone and other formations. Producing it required field observation, money, engraving and hand colouring. Geology became something a reader could trace across an entire region.
Medical statistics · 1850s
Florence Nightingale’s work after the Crimean War extended far beyond the ward. She gathered mortality figures and pressed for changes in military health administration. This diagram compares successive years in the British Army in the East, distinguishing deaths attributed to disease, wounds and other causes. Its large blue areas made preventable illness difficult to overlook. The terminology belongs to nineteenth-century medicine, and the figures summarise populations rather than individual experiences. Alongside her written reports, such graphics helped turn the conditions of military service into a subject of public argument and reform.
Communications · 1850s
Before a transatlantic cable, a message between Europe and North America generally travelled as fast as a ship. The cable project promised to shrink that delay dramatically, but demanded difficult work at sea and reliable insulation over a vast distance. In 1858 a cable finally connected Newfoundland and Ireland. Celebrations ran ahead of its durability: that connection soon failed, and dependable service followed later. This map presents the crossing as a system, linking shore stations, steamship routes and land communications while also showing the seabed the cable had to cross.
Economic history · 1700s–1800s
William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas, first published in 1786, offered readers a different way to examine public figures. A line on a graph could make a rise, fall or comparison apparent without requiring a reader to hold a column of numbers in mind. This plate charts ordnance expenditure from 1722 to 1785; the reproduced edition dates from 1801. Its subject was military supply and artillery administration. The image belongs to the early history of statistical graphics, when familiar forms of today’s newspapers and reports were still unusual ways of making an argument.
Scientific instruments · 1650s
An astrolabe puts a model of the sky into a hand-held instrument. Its engraved circles and moving parts bring geometry into contact with observations of the sun and stars. This example was made by Muhammad Zaman al-Munajjim al-Asturlabi and is attributed to Mashhad, Iran. Its date, 1065 in the Islamic calendar, corresponds to 1654–55 in the Gregorian calendar. Brasswork, lettering and calculation meet in the same object. Such instruments could help with timekeeping and astrological calculations, though this particular example’s size limited the precision of astronomical observations.
Japanese cartography · 1850s
Long before Tokyo became the name of Japan’s capital, Edo stood within Musashi Province. The historical province also included land now in Saitama and Kanagawa. This woodblock map from the 1850s presents that region through place names, waterways and mountain profiles. Its lettering and pictorial features organise a reading experience that does not depend on a single north-up viewing position. Printed maps belonged to a busy culture of travel, publishing and local knowledge in late Tokugawa Japan. They offered readers a way to imagine connections between familiar places and more distant destinations.
Exploration cartography · 1500s
In 1502, geographical information could be a valuable diplomatic possession. The chart now called the Cantino planisphere brought together Portuguese knowledge of African coasts, Atlantic lands and routes reaching toward the Indian Ocean. Alberto Cantino obtained it in Lisbon and sent it to his patron in Ferrara. Its anonymous maker drew on accumulated reports and charts, rather than one person’s travels. The surviving parchment is now in Modena. Its Italian collecting history and Portuguese production context sit beside a much wider history of encounters, commerce and imperial ambition represented on the sheet.
Ottoman cartography · 1510s
The surviving portion of Piri Reis’s 1513 world map brings Atlantic information into an Ottoman cartographic setting. Piri Reis was a seaman and compiler who combined earlier sources rather than claiming to have visited every coast himself. The parchment connects parts of the Americas with western Africa and Europe, using the coastal detail and visual language of maritime charts. Only a fragment of the larger map survives. Its fame rests partly on the way it preserves knowledge moving between people and empires during the decades after Columbus’s voyages, not on possessing a perfect modern outline.
Urban transport · 1900s
London’s Underground did not begin as one neatly unified system. Separate railway companies built routes, stations and identities that passengers had to piece together. The 1908 map brings underground railways onto a common sheet while retaining streets and the Thames as geographical guides. It belongs to the years before Harry Beck’s famous diagram changed the balance between location and connection. For a passenger, the practical question was already familiar: which line reaches the right station? The map captures a network becoming easier to recognise as a single part of London’s everyday life.
Advertising history · 1890s
A cake of soap became much more than a household purchase in nineteenth-century advertising. Manufacturers sold ideas about cleanliness, respectability and desirable ways of living alongside the product itself. Pears became especially skilled at attracting attention through pictures and memorable copy. This advertisement appeared in an American magazine in October 1890, carrying a British brand into a transatlantic market. Its crowded shop scene makes demand look contagious. The warning against substitutes then directs that excitement toward a particular name, reminding us that an advertisement’s immediate job was to persuade a buyer.
History of chemistry · 1860s
In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev tried to arrange the known elements using atomic weights and chemical similarities. The result looks unfamiliar beside a modern classroom table, but its purpose is recognisable: make a complicated body of knowledge reveal an order. Question marks left room for elements or values that were not yet securely known. Those gaps were a productive feature of the system, not merely unfinished typesetting. Subsequent discoveries and revisions changed the arrangement, while the later understanding of atomic number supplied a different foundation for the periodic table used today.
Statistical cartography · 1810s / 1860s
Charles Joseph Minard published this graphic in 1869, more than half a century after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. He turned the campaign into a geographical account of loss: a broad outward band narrows on the journey toward Moscow, and a dark return band dwindles further. Rivers, branches of the march and temperatures share the page with troop counts. It is an engineer’s retrospective construction from historical information. The result draws attention away from a sequence of victories and defeats toward the shrinking number of people who continued along the route.
Railway logistics · 1830s
The expanding railways created a new reading problem for travellers: lines built by different companies had to be understood as possible journeys. George Bradshaw’s small publications brought railway information into a portable form. This 1839 volume combines a dated title page with a map distinguishing lines already open from those still in progress. That distinction mattered to anyone trying to travel rather than simply imagine a future network. Engraving, printing and frequent revision became part of railway infrastructure, helping passengers turn an expanding collection of tracks into plans for movement.
Communications history · 1840s / 1900
On 24 May 1844, Samuel Morse sent a message from Washington to Alfred Vail in Baltimore over an experimental telegraph line. Annie Ellsworth had suggested the biblical phrase “What hath God wrought?” The event became an enduring scene in accounts of American invention. This illustration appeared much later, in Elbridge S. Brooks’s 1900 history of the nineteenth century. By then, telegraph networks had become everyday infrastructure. The picture shows how an earlier technical demonstration was remembered and staged for readers looking back over a century of change.
Earth science · Satellite change detection
The Aral Sea once received the flow of two great Central Asian river systems. Large irrigation diversions, developed especially during the Soviet period, greatly reduced the water reaching it. As the sea shrank, fishing communities lost access to water and exposed sediments became a source of dust and salt. These satellite views show the southern sea in 2000 and 2014, when its eastern basin had largely dried. The northern and western waters have different histories. Comparing the images begins a story about rivers, agriculture and political decisions extending far beyond the shoreline.
Exploration · Early nineteenth century
In autumn 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition followed the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia river system toward the Pacific. These were not routes through an unpeopled landscape. Nez Perce guides Walamottinin and Tetoharsky helped the party, and communities along the rivers supplied knowledge, trade and assistance. The expedition reached the Snake–Columbia confluence on 16 October. A map printed in 1814 later gathered the journey into a continuous track. Its line makes travel look orderly, while the journals and Indigenous histories restore the encounters and decisions that made movement possible.
Civic records · Early twentieth century
Congress proposed the Nineteenth Amendment in June 1919 after decades of organising, lobbying and protest. The states then had to ratify it; the necessary threshold was reached in August 1920. The joint resolution shown here belongs to the congressional stage, not the final ratification. Its short text barred denial of voting rights on account of sex. That legal change was consequential, but it did not sweep away racial disfranchisement, citizenship restrictions or other barriers. The history of women voting therefore continues beyond the amendment, through the people who still had to fight for practical access to the ballot.
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