This is how football helmets were tested in the early 1900s:
Someone had to hand-carve all of the presidents' eyes on Mount Rushmore:
For some reason unbeknownst to me, in 1920 a policeman did this off a building in New York:
Car seats for children were incredibly dangerous in the 1940s:
The original design for the Michelin Man was absolutely terrifying:
This is what an early design for an electric hair dryer looked like:
These are the contestants in the 1930 Miss Lovely Eyes beauty pageant, a contest where woman had to wear an absolutely terrifying mask so that only her eyes were visible:
Easter Bunny costumes were absolutely horrifying in the 1950s:
This poster from the late 1800s advertises a fight between "the world's thinnest man" and "the world's fattest man":
This is the Dynasphere, a giant wheel vehicle invented by Dr. J. A. Purves that could go as a fast as 30 MPH:
Before CGI, this is how MGM filmed its iconic movie intro:
The very first iteration of Ronald McDonald was created by Willard Scott in 1963:
This is how condoms were tested in the 1930s:
For a brief but wondrous moment in time, you could get potatoes from a vending machine:
Beer vending machines were also a thing:
Before modern car washes were invented, one particularly wacky idea was for cars to drive around through water in a circle:
This is what a gym looked like two centuries ago in 1831:
This totally safe device was known as a baby cage, a wire cage suspended out of an apartment window meant to give babies born in cities extra light and air:
This is 455 pound Piet van der Zwaard AKA the "fattest man in Europe" in 1955:
This is Pauline Musters, the shortest woman ever to live:
She was 24 inches tall when she died at the age of 19.
In the 1930s, this couple won an Atlantic City dance marathon after dancing for 1,473 hours:
And, yes, people did fall asleep standing up while dancing at these marathons:
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