I love this set of old photos with all these great stunts. Maybe stunts today seem more spectacular but they don’t have that thing that makes them believable and in most cases computer graphics are used.
Here, there’s no green screen or security equipment. They only have two options: whether they succeed or they fail. Real daredevils from back then.
Trick-shot champion Bob Geesey, a cop in York, Pennsylvania, blasts a pipe from his wife's mouth during a demonstration of his shooting skill in 1948.
Harold Lloyd from the 1923 film, Safety Last.
A bicycle with 12 rockets mounted on the back wheel
Millie Kayes swallows the head of a 12-foot python
Ben Fox stands on his head on a small platform high above the streets of Allentown, Pennsylvania.
A high wire expert balances on the roof of a Renault car, which in turn is balanced on a rope
A circus strongwoman balances a piano and a pianist on her chest, circa 1920.
Harry Gardiner hangs from the 24th story of the Hotel McAlpin in New York.
Sergeant Major Tom Gledhill, riding a standard BSA A50 twin motorcycle, leaps over 20 members of the Royal Artillery Motor Bike display team, England, 1966.
Stuntman "Frankony" performs an aerial somersault at the Dyrehavsbakken, or Bakken ("The Hill"), amusement park in Denmark.
A man chews up a gramophone record. Beside him is a table with light bulbs about to be eaten, as well.
Spanish high-wire cycling act, The Mestelrich Trio
Richard Schindler, an aerial acrobat notorious for his foolhardy stunts, practices one of his tricks.
Two waiters serve two steel workers lunch on a girder high above New York City, November, 1930.
Atop the Eiffel Tower
The high-diving horse
Two men sit on-board a floating bedstead in the sea near Dover, England, preparing to cross the Channel.
French daredevil Jean Francois Gravelet Blondin, a.k.a "The Great Blondin," pushes a wheelbarrow across a tightrope above the Niagara River Gorge, c. 1859.
Stan Bonds, stuntman, enveloped in flames, dives into a water tank at Battersea Pleasure Gardens, London.
A strongman holds a rock on his chest while two men try to smash it with hammers.
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