The photo looks a bit unreal. You might think it’s an illustration and not a photo at all. If so, let’s inspire you by revealing that it is a composite photo, meaning that every segment of the photo is something that nature photographer Ralph Clevenger actually captured with his camera. The process of compositing such an image really is impressive. The iceberg combines two different photos, one that he took in Alaska, and one that he took in Antarctica. The clouds and water, meanwhile, are two other different photos, both from California.
Just one little hitch, though: That huge ice mass under the water? Clevenger took that above the water, and then he inverted the image and placed it at the bottom of his photo. The color is real, no tinting was necessary to make it look all underwatery, but it doesn’t show ice lurking below because that ice in real life isn’t below anything. Turns out it’s physically impossible to capture the entirety of an iceberg, because we’re forced to obey the laws of optics.
Still, if you really love the stat that an iceberg is nine times bigger below the surface, don’t worry. That fact is still true. Now picture the photo’s bottom half floating above the water in Alaska, and imagine how huge its bottom must be. Not quite as huge as yo’ momma’s, but still.
Related: Floating Ship Appears Above English Coast
Tesla’s Not Really Chilling With Lightning Here
Dickenson V. Alley
At the end of the 19th century, scientists like Edison and Westinghouse were warring over what sort of electricity works best. Meanwhile, Nikola Tesla (who was in the Westinghouse camp) was playing around with a kind of electricity transmission that sounded insane. He had something called a magnifying transmitter, which… well, sources dispute exactly what it did.
It was a novel system of transmitting electricity, said Tesla. It was a world-changing invention, he said. Or maybe it was just one of his Tesla coil circuits with an added kink, with very little possible real-world use. But while you won’t find many sources going into detail about the applications of his magnifying transmitter, you’ll find a whole lot reproducing the above image, of the man calmly reading in his Colorado Springs lab while the device was sparking madly. Whatever it was, it had to be safer than it looked, since the inventor stayed so close to it. Either that, or Tesla had balls of steel (note: balls of steel are excellent components for building a resonant transformer circuit).
That’s actually a publicity photo. Tesla was never sitting in the room like that while the infernal machine was operating. They took one photo of him seated in the room on that chair. Then they took a second photo of the machine in action on that same photographic plate, for a double exposure, adding in the millions of volts of celestial fury.
Wow, Tesla sometimes deceived people for the sake of building his image? Good thing no one associates that sort of chicanery with his name today.
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