The First Photobomber and Other 'New' Fads that are actually Ancient History
It’s no secret that almost every fad eventually loses its appeal. (We’re looking at you, post-lockdown mullet!) However, some trends seem to have always been around because, well, they have always been around, at least as far as we can remember—and then some.
Photobombing
In case you haven’t noticed, people have been taking a lot more pictures since the invention of the smartphone. As a result, countless individuals go out of their way to make chance encounters as memorable as possible—for themselves. The word ‘photobombing’, meaning popping up in a photo uninvited, first appeared online in 2008 and was enshrined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2015.
The oldest known example of this odd behaviour took place in the early 1850s, when a woman named Sally sat alongside a Mrs. Reed for a photographic portrait by Mary Dillwyn. We know these details because they were written on the picture, which we still have in the National Library of Wales. The ladies are dressed fashionably: high collars, dark dresses, and shawls and bonnets that look as if they once belonged to Whistler’s mother. What we don’t know is why the smug young girl with the grinning face in the top-left corner peering around a screen decided to upstage their portrait.
Reboots
Stop us if this sounds familiar: “Hollywood frequently digs up old plots, remaking successful movies of the past … and inevitably watering them down. This sterile rehashing and stealing of stories ... is significant.” If you think that comes from an angry critic reviewing the latest iteration of Planet of the Apes, think again. Social critic Trent Hutter wrote the complaint in the 1950s.
Reboots and remakes are nothing new. If your oldest relatives told you their favourite movie was The Wizard of Oz, you’d probably think they were talking about the 1939 classic starring Judy Garland. But if they corrected you by saying, “No, the silent movie!” then they were probably talking about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, released in 1910.
This forgotten relic is not only the oldest known motion picture based on L...
Photobombing
In case you haven’t noticed, people have been taking a lot more pictures since the invention of the smartphone. As a result, countless individuals go out of their way to make chance encounters as memorable as possible—for themselves. The word ‘photobombing’, meaning popping up in a photo uninvited, first appeared online in 2008 and was enshrined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2015.
The oldest known example of this odd behaviour took place in the early 1850s, when a woman named Sally sat alongside a Mrs. Reed for a photographic portrait by Mary Dillwyn. We know these details because they were written on the picture, which we still have in the National Library of Wales. The ladies are dressed fashionably: high collars, dark dresses, and shawls and bonnets that look as if they once belonged to Whistler’s mother. What we don’t know is why the smug young girl with the grinning face in the top-left corner peering around a screen decided to upstage their portrait.
Reboots
Stop us if this sounds familiar: “Hollywood frequently digs up old plots, remaking successful movies of the past … and inevitably watering them down. This sterile rehashing and stealing of stories ... is significant.” If you think that comes from an angry critic reviewing the latest iteration of Planet of the Apes, think again. Social critic Trent Hutter wrote the complaint in the 1950s.
Reboots and remakes are nothing new. If your oldest relatives told you their favourite movie was The Wizard of Oz, you’d probably think they were talking about the 1939 classic starring Judy Garland. But if they corrected you by saying, “No, the silent movie!” then they were probably talking about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, released in 1910.
This forgotten relic is not only the oldest known motion picture based on L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, which had just been published a few years earlier, it was the first film in an entire series.
Quite a few other classic movies were based on older films. Alfred Hitchcock even remade one of his own films, the 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. His 1956 version kept the name but was filmed in colour and had a whole new script that included songs for its female lead, Doris Day.
These originals and their remakes were all considered great successes. But not everyone is a fan of reimagining masterpieces, including John Huston, who directed a few classics himself (Maltese Falcon, anyone?) He’s been quoted as suggesting, “Why don’t we remake some of our bad pictures ... and make them good?”
Gag Gifts
Pet rocks, bobbleheads and other novelties are mainstays at souvenir shops around the world. But some of the sillier gifts you’ll find while out of town are older than almost every country on the planet.
If you were visiting Rome in A.D. 70, a funny trinket you could take as a keepsake was a stylus, an ancient pencil-like writing instrument. According to the Museum of London Archaeology, one such stylus in its possession bears this inscription along its sides: “I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me. I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able [to give] as generously as the way is long [and] as my purse is empty.”
In other words, “I went to Rome, and all I got you was this stupid pencil.”
As for exchanging gag gifts, the ancient Romans did that as well, especially during Saturnalia, a holiday in December (think a Roman Christmas). One such gift was the ‘air pillow’, a precursor to the whoopee cushion. It was, according to the ancient Roman biographer Lampridius, a favourite of an adolescent emperor named Elagabalus.
“Some of his humbler friends he would seat on air-pillows instead of on cushions,” Lampridius wrote, “and let out the air while they were dining, so that often the diners were suddenly found under the table.”
It seems he pulled one prank too many; Elagabalus was assassinated shortly after, at the ripe old age of 18.
Fan Fiction
If you ever wrote or imagined an original story that featured your favourite fictional characters, congratulations! You have contributed to the world of fan fiction, a literary genre where amateur writers craft new stories with famous—and frequently copyright-protected—characters.
We must emphasize ‘copyright-protected' since fan fiction occasionally becomes the stuff of lawsuits. However, all the lawyers on the planet can’t stop fans of Harry Potter or Star Wars from freely sharing their own original tales across the internet. Some of these writers even strike it rich: E. L. James’s bestselling Fifty Shades trilogy began as online stories following the lovers from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series on their … well, let’s just say on their new adventures.
While this may sound like a bypro-duct of the internet, fan fiction is actual among the oldest forms of literature. Virgil’s Aeneid, the Roman epic that tells the tale of the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy, features characters and storylines lifted straight from the Greek poet Homer eight centuries earlier.
More recently, Old Friends and New Fancies: An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen appeared (unauthorized!) in bookstores in 1914. Twenty years earlier, J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, wrote an imaginative article for The St. James’s Gazette in which Dr. Watson was suspected of Sherlock Holmes’s death in the short story The Adventure of the Final Problem.
And in 1614, someone writing under the pseudonym Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda had the guts to publish a sequel to Don Quixote before Miguel de Cervantes even finished his second volume. Maybe that’s why George R. R. Martin is in no rush to finish the last two installments of his seven-book series A Song of Ice and Fire. Someone else may write it for him.
Selfies
While we can’t say for certain whether any western pioneers angered a bison while posing near one for a photo, the ‘selfie’ is just a few years older than the camera, which was invented in 1825 by Nicéphore Niépce of France.
According to the Library of Congress, the oldest photographic self-portrait in existence was taken in Philadelphia sometime around Halloween in 1839. The man in the picture was an interesting character: Robert Cornelius, a photographer and inventor who made a fortune designing lamps that burned lard instead of whale oil.
As if being rich, intelligent, artistic and a friend to whales was not enough, the guy was also pretty easy on the eyes. Described as “broodingly handsome with his collar upturned and his hair disheveled” on the Timeless blog from the Library of Congress, Robert Cornelius’s historic selfie is a swipe-right keeper.
LOLcats
If you’ve ever viewed or shared an image of a cat accompanied by a funny caption, you have no reason to be ashamed. You just enjoyed a LOLcat, which originated in the early 1870s when British photographer Harry Pointer began taking pictures of his cats.
The first were pretty standard, but Pointer eventually realized that his photos would be more interesting if he staged scenes starring his cats performing human activities, such as hosting tea parties, reading the newspaper and holding question time with the ‘Prime Minister Lord Pawmerston.’
Soon Pointer added captions to his pictures—often as tame as the cats—that said things like “Happy New Year” or “Happy returns.” In short, LOLcats have been around for about as long as humans have been rendered powerless by feline cuteness.
Influencers
It seems it’s never been easier for someone to amass a worldwide following. Take Emma Chamberlain.
Emma who? You may not know her, but more than nine million girls and young women were glued to her every utterance on YouTube concerning fashion and society in general. She became so popular that Louis Vuitton hired her as a brand ambassador.
“Hold my telescope,” says astrophysicist, author and proud nerd Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has a stratospheric 20 million-plus social media followers. These are two very different examples of people using their personalities to affect how others dress, shop, speak and think.
Social influencers might sound like a 21st-century phenomenon, but they’ve been around far longer than anything online. Cleopatra, for example, caused quite a stir in 46 B.C. when she first visited Rome. According to biographer Stacy Schiff in Cleopatra: A Life, her very presence “set off a brief vogue for an elaborate hairstyle,” the melon coiffure, her signature bun.
Centuries later, in the mid-1800s, Amelia Bloomer’s ‘bloomers’ became a feminist fashion statement. Even though she did not originate the dress—essentially, a skirt worn over loose trousers—Bloomer’s writing on the subject in the women’s newspaper The Lily set off a sexist firestorm. Soon, early feminists like Elizabeth Smith Miller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were ditching the fashionable (but uncomfortable) dresses of the day, and men throughout the United States were outraged.
Women, meanwhile, sent Bloomer hundreds of letters “making inquiries about the dress and asking for patterns—showing how ready and anxious women were to throw off the burden of long, heavy skirts,” Bloomer wrote.
During the Civil War, Union general Ambrose Burnside became an unexpected style icon. If it were not for him, we would still be calling sideburns ‘side whiskers’. That’s because his sideburns joined together to form a mustache. Only his chin was clean-shaven. His military skills, however, got zero likes after he suffered disastrous defeats at Fredericksburg and Petersburg. But, oh, those sideburns!
3D Movies
If you took your kids to see Minions 2 in IMAX 3D and walked away thinking it was a groundbreaking experience, you’re wrong. Hollywood has been making 3D movies since Bette Davis was a teenager
Back in 1922, a little-known film titled The Power of Love premiered and caused quite a stir. Here’s the plot: Because of financial troubles, Don Almeda promises his daughter, Maria, to Don Alvarez. But Maria doesn’t love Don Alvarez. She loves … oh, never mind. The plot isn’t what made this film revolutionary.
It was the first to offer audiences 3D visuals by showing the entire film through anaglyphs: nearly identical overlapping images shown in different colours. The process tricked the brain when people viewed films like The Power of Love through 3D glasses with a red-tinted lens and a blue-tinted lens.
In addition to eye-popping visuals, The Power of Love enabled audiences to view one of two different endings to its main story. Since the film was two versions in different colours—one playing on top of the other—covering or closing one eye at a crucial moment allowed viewers to experience whichever conclusion to the film they wished.
Text Speak
OMG! Did you know people have been using expressions like OMG for over a century? And for the same reasons we do today.
Texting lingo, aka SMS (short message service), has saved people time and money across countless conversations since the invention of the telegraph.
Abbreviations became more frequent in correspondence once people realized how long it took to tap out words like ‘abbreviations’ and ‘correspondence’ in Morse code. To make it easier on people’s fingers, in 1879 journalist Walter P. Phillips published a book of shorthand terms for telegraph operators.
Among his suggestions were ‘POTUS’ and ‘SCOTUS’ for the President and Supreme Court of the United States, respectively. While ‘administratrix’ might sound less like a kinky office manager when shortened to ‘ADX’, ‘AWKWD’ remains just as awkward.
The military joined in the fun a few decades later with the result that American soldiers have been going ‘AWOL’ since World War I, and orders to arrest the absentees have been sent ASAP since the Korean conflict.
As for ‘OMG’, its earliest usage was in a letter a British admiral sent to Winston Churchill in 1917. The admiral kindly explained that ‘O.M.G.’ stood for “Oh! My God!” We doubt he was addressing Churchill.