Random Fascinating Historical Artifacts Stored In Library of Congress (16 items)

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  (#4) America's Birth Certificate

  The “birth certificate” is actually a world map described as the first document printed with the name “America.” Created by cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 CE and acquired by the Library of Congress in 2003, the world map has a mouthful of a Latin name: “Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorū que lustratione,” which translates to “A drawing of the whole earth following the tradition of Ptolemy and the travels of Amerigo Vespucci and others.” To Americans today, the map probably looks fairly accurate, but to long-ago Europeans, “America” was a big chunk of unknown continent. The document is also the first map to show a separate Western Hemisphere and Pacific Ocean.
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  (#7) Bizarre Health Product Labels

  Weight watchers in the U.S. at the turn of the century were more worried about being too thin (unhealthy) than being too fat (a sign of vim and vigor). This color lithograph from the Library of Congress, published circa 1895, is an advertising label for fat-producing products called Loring's Fat-Ten-U food tablets and Loring's Corpula food. A drugstore ad for the products, complete with skinny before and corpulent after drawings, said they were “guaranteed to make the thin plump and rosy with honest fleshiness of form."  
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  (#16) Helen Keller's Plea To Alexander Bell

  In the early 1900s, famous folks, like everyone else, communicated via telegram. The celebrities involved in a 1907 telegram donated to the Library of Congress are Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind, yet became a noted speaker and activist, and Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone and was also an advocate for deaf people. In the telegram, sent before Keller delivers a talk in New York, she asks Bell if he will “stand beside me and repeat my speech so that all may hear?”
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  (#15) First Known Book Printed In America

  Officially – but clunkily – titled The Whole booke of Psalmes faithfully translated into English metre, North America’s first known printed book is also called The Bay Psalm Book because it was created in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1640 (20 years after the Mayflower landed). Basically, it’s a hymnal, with words but no music notes. It’s translated from Hebrew to English, with funky old spellings: “With expectation for the Lord / I wayted patiently, / and hee inclined unto mee, / alfo he heard my cry.”
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  (#1) Fred Ott's Sneeze

  • Short Film

  “Ah-CHOO.” Sneeze and you’ll miss this five-second movie, the first motion picture to be copyrighted in the United States. Fred Ott's Sneeze is a black-and-white, silent kinetoscopic film shot in 1894 by William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, one of Thomas Edison’s assistants. In the film, Fred Ott, an Edison employee known for his comic antics, takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. According to the Library of Congress, it was filmed "for publicity purposes as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper’s weekly.”
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  (#5) A Monopoly Board Game Precursor

  Before Parker Brothers started selling the popular game Monopoly in 1935, the company dabbled in economics and business via a board game called “The Office Boy,” released in 1889. According to the Museum of Play, the game was produced during the days of Horatio Alger’s stories about young men achieving the American Dream. Players work their way up in the company from stock boy to traveling salesman to junior partner to head of the firm. “Carelessness” and “temperance” set players back; “integrity” and “promptness” put them on the path to promotion. The Office Girls didn't even get to pass Go.  

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