|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In May 1898, a tornado touched down in Waynoka, Oklahoma. At the time, a photograph purportedly showing two men on a road watching the twister was published in contemporary newspapers such as Philadelphia Press. Many years later, the image reappeared and made the usual viral rounds on social media, now bearing claims that it was one of the first photographs ever taken of a tornado: The story behind this image actually starts with yet another photograph. A man (only identified as a Mr. Connor) sent the Monthly Weather Review an image purportedly showing the tornado. The editors of the weather journal, who were growing accustomed to fans sending in photographic fakes, were skeptical about the authenticity of the image and decided to file it away rather than publish it: The Monthly Weather Review received another curious photograph shortly after a tornado hit Kirksville, Missouri on 27 April 1899, this one from a Mr. Gosewisch. Although this photograph featured two men on a road and was attached to a different date and location, it featured the same twister: The images — as stated by the Monthly Weather Review — are composites, originally created by photographer North Losey. Losey was a frontier photographer who captured images of Native Americans, presidents, and daily life throughout the Midwest. Losey held various photography patents, and ended up gaining some notoriety in the early 1800s for superimposing tornadoes into various rural settings. We found several similar images (most likely created by Losey) via the American Museum of Natural History and the Library of Congress: (We flipped the photograph shown in the top left in this image to better match the position of the other twisters.) While it is clear that many of these images are composites, as they all feature identical funnels supposedly taken at different times and locations, were they all based on a photograph of a real tornado? The Library of Congress examined a scan of Oklahoma Cyclone (no.2) — pictured at the bottom right — and told us that the tornado appeared edited or possibly faked: A.J. Henry of the Weather Bureau proposed two theories in a 1 May 1899 article (with the pointed title Spurious Tornado Photographs) about the authenticity of the photographs. The first dealt with the bulbous clouds, which Henry believed to be genuine, although taken from a less ominous event (such as a sunset). The second theory dealt with the twister itself, which Henry believed was hand-drawn onto a piece of glass that was then placed over a landscape negative and photographed: Professor Henry ended the piece with a piece of prescient wisdom: The Monthly Weather Journal could not have been more right, as evidenced by a plethora of fake or miscaptioned photographs of water spouts, hurricanes, storm clouds, and, of course, tornadoes. Although many of today's hoaxes are created in an effort to do nothing more than deceive, that may not have been North Losey's goal. Relatively few people had witnessed an actual tornado in the late 1800s, and those who had not had to rely largely on sketches or textual descriptions of what they were like. Photographers at the time were not equipped to capture clear images of these extreme storms, and so they often augmented their photographs to make the story they told more appealing to the public: According to the New York Times, the following image is often considered the first photograph of a tornado. It was retouched and then sold as a postcard:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}