We’ve all seen the Hin­den­burg. Specif­i­cal­ly, we’ve all seen it explod­ing, an inci­dent cap­tured on film on that fate­ful day of May 6, 1937 — fate­ful for those aboard, of course, but also fate­ful for the pas­sen­ger air­ship indus­try, which nev­er recov­ered from this worst of all pos­si­ble press. The con­tem­po­rary rise of Pan Amer­i­can Air­lines did­n’t help, either, so now, when we want to go to a far­away land, we’ve usu­al­ly got to take a jet. I hap­pen to be mov­ing to Korea tomor­row, and to get there I sim­ply don’t have the choice of an air­ship (Hin­den­burg- class or oth­er­wise) nor have I ever had that choice. I’ve thus nev­er seen the inside of an air­ship — until today.

These col­or images reveal the inte­ri­or of not just any old 1930s air­ship but the Hin­den­burg itself, look­ing as gen­teel and well-appoint­ed as you might expect, with accom­mo­da­tions up to and includ­ing, some­where below its hydro­gen-filled bal­loon, a smok­ing room. It brings to mind Sideshow Bob’s off­hand com­ment on one Simp­sons episode lament­ing the pas­sage of “the days when avi­a­tion was a gentleman’s pur­suit, back before every Joe Sweat­sock could wedge him­self behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham.” But then, it also brings to mind anoth­er episode in which Bart gets a check­book print­ed with flip­book-style images of the famous Hin­den­burg dis­as­ter news­reel footage.

That clip, often dubbed with Her­bert Mor­rison’s “Oh, the human­i­ty!” repor­to­r­i­al nar­ra­tion, has famil­iar­ized us with the last large pas­sen­ger air­ship’s exte­ri­or, but these images of its inte­ri­or have had less expo­sure. For more, have a look at Airships.net: a Diri­gi­ble and Zep­pelin His­to­ry Site, which offers a wealth of detail on the Hin­den­burg’s pas­sen­ger decks, con­trol car, flight instru­ment, flight con­trols, crew areas, and keel.

The more you learn about air­ships, the more intrigu­ing a form of trav­el they seem — until you learn about all the oth­er dis­as­ters that pre­ced­ed the Hin­den­burg, any­way. And that aside, giv­en its top speed of 84 miles per hour, it would take a sim­i­lar­ly retro air­ship at least sev­en times longer to get me to Korea than a jet, so I guess I’ll have to stick with the air­lines for now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oh the Human­i­ty

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry Of Avi­a­tion: From da Vinci’s Sketch­es to Apol­lo 11

The Mir­a­cle of Flight, the Clas­sic Ear­ly Ani­ma­tion by Ter­ry Gilliam

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Any fan of samu­rai movies knows the elab­o­rate lengths some pro­duc­tions can go to in order to recre­ate the look and feel of old Japan, but glo­be­trot­ting Ital­ian-British pho­tog­ra­ph­er Felice Beato (1832 — 1909) actu­al­ly man­aged to cap­ture those days on cel­lu­loid first-hand. He arrived in Japan in 1863, at the very twi­light of the era of the samu­rai, a time he doc­u­ment­ed evoca­tive­ly with a series of hand-col­ored pho­tographs of sub­jects like “kimonos, para­sols, baby’s toys, bas­ket sell­ers, cour­te­sans at rest and a samu­rai gang ready for action,” as the Guardian lists them in their gallery of Beat­o’s Japan­ese work.

“After spend­ing over two hun­dred years in seclu­sion, Japan was being forced by the Amer­i­cans — under a mis­sion led by Com­modore Matthew C. Per­ry — to expand its trade with the west,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Paul Gal­lagher, describ­ing the unprece­dent­ed moment of Japan­ese his­to­ry in which Beato found him­self, one that pro­vid­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pho­to­graph not just the last of the samu­rais but also the cour­te­sans they loved. But all this had its risks: “Trav­el was dan­ger­ous in Japan,” Gal­lagher adds, “with many of the Shogu­nate samu­rai war­riors killing west­ern­ers,” a fate Beato nar­row­ly avoid­ed at least once.

Hav­ing pho­tographed in Con­stan­tino­ple, India, and Chi­na before Japan, Beato moved on after it to oth­er parts of Asia, includ­ing Korea and Bur­ma, before return­ing to his native Italy at the very end of his life. But his pic­tures of Japan remain among the most strik­ing of his entire career, per­haps because of their artis­tic use of col­or, per­haps because of a his­tor­i­cal time and place that we think we’ve come to know through so many sword-and-sui­cide epics. Their char­ac­ters, from the hon­or-bound samu­rai to the sly cour­te­san to the sim­ple mer­chant, can seem to us a bit the­atri­cal as a result, but Beat­o’s pho­tographs remind us that they all began as very real peo­ple. Who might they inspire to make a film about their real lives?

via The Guardian/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs of 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The lag time between our imag­in­ing of social equal­i­ty and its arrival can be sig­nif­i­cant­ly long indeed, or it least it can seem so, giv­en the lim­i­ta­tions of human mor­tal­i­ty. 113 years may not be an espe­cial­ly long time for a tree, say, or even a very healthy Gala­pa­gos tor­toise, but if you or I had been alive in 1902, chances are we’d nev­er know that in 2015 the pres­i­dent of Europe’s most pow­er­ful nation is a woman, as are two major pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates in the Unit­ed States. Giv­en the amount of inequal­i­ty we still see world­wide, this may not always feel like a tri­umph. In 1902, it might have seemed like “noth­ing but fan­ta­sy.”

And yet even then, it was cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble to fore­see women occu­py­ing all the roles that men did, through the lens­es, writes Lau­ra Hud­son at Boing Boing, of “fan­ta­sy and sci­ence fic­tion,” which “can often help us open our minds behind the lim­i­ta­tions of the world we live in and imag­ine a bet­ter one instead.” In 1902, artist Albert Berg­eret was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate the trad­ing cards you see here—just a small selec­tion of twen­ty total pho­tographs called “Les Femmes de l’Avenir”—Women of the Future. Only one theme among many in a series of dif­fer­ent sets of cards, this “retro­fu­tur­is­tic attempt to expand the role of women in soci­ety” showed us a “small and fash­ion­able world” where “women were giv­en a more equal role in soci­ety, not to men­tion spec­tac­u­lar hats.”

That may be so, but just as we can nev­er accu­rate­ly see the future, we can also nev­er reach con­sen­sus on the mean­ing of the past. The Dai­ly Mail’s Maysa Rawi agrees with Hud­son about the “pin-up qual­i­ty to many of the images,” which show “an awful lot of arm.”  And yet Rawi dis­par­ages the entire set as “meant to cap­ture men’s fan­tasies rather than be part of any fem­i­nist move­ment.” I’ll admit, I don’t see the cards this way at all, nor do I think the cat­e­gories are mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. Pin-up girls have also rep­re­sent­ed social pow­er, albeit main­ly sex­u­al pow­er. Scant­i­ly-clad female super­heroes like Won­der Woman, though craft­ed to appeal to the fan­tasies of teenage boys, are also pow­er­ful because… well, they have super­pow­ers.

Per­haps that’s one way to look at Bergeret’s cards. He is not mock­ing his sub­jects, nor hyper-sex­u­al­iz­ing them, but pre­sent­ing, as each card indi­cates, advanced futur­is­tic beings who didn’t yet exist in his time. The Dai­ly Mail cap­tions sev­er­al of the pho­tos with fac­toids about women’s advances in French his­to­ry. In some cas­es, Berg­eret did not have to extrap­o­late far. Women could prac­tice law in 1900; women served in the army dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, but did not fight. Col­leges had been open to women since 1879. A few women worked as doc­tors and jour­nal­ists in Bergeret’s time. Marie Curie, you’ll recall, had dis­cov­ered polo­ni­um, coined the term “radioac­tiv­i­ty,”  and would win the Nobel Prize in 1903. Queen Vic­to­ria had ruled over half the world.

But French women would have to wait sev­er­al more decades to enter most of the pro­fes­sions rep­re­sent­ed. No mat­ter how sexy—and in some cas­es ridiculous—some of the cos­tumes in these pho­tos, Berg­eret shot the mod­els with poise, style, and dig­ni­ty. Per­haps he and many in his audi­ence could eas­i­ly imag­ine female gen­er­als, may­ors, fire­women, sol­diers, etc. Yet one par­tic­u­lar card stands out. It por­trays a self-sat­is­fied, Bohemi­an mod­el labeled “rapin”—which a read­er below informs us is “an argot word for (bad) painter.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness