Images extracted from the latter half of Choregraphie, a book first published in 1700 which details a dance notation system invented by Raoul-Auger Feuillet which revolutionised the dance world. Voltaire ranked the invention as one of the "achievements of his day" and Diderot devoted ten pages to the subject in his Encylopdédie.

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Universal Newsreel showing footage of the launch of a Titan II rocket in 1963 along with images from the unmanned capsule of the first stage being dropped. Beneath the falling debris of the discarded first stage the curvature of the earth is clearly visible.

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In the latter half of the 17th century the English polymath Thomas Browne wrote Musaeum Clausum, an imagined inventory of 'remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living'. Claire Preston explores Browne's extraordinary catalogue amid the wider context of a Renaissance preoccupation with lost intellectual treasures.

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When the French explorer Lapérouse went missing, a search voyage was put together to retrace his course around the islands of Australasia. On the mission was the naturalist Jacques Labillardière who published a book in 1800 of his experiences. Edward Duyker, author of Citizen Labillardière: A Naturalist’s Life in Revolution and Exploration (1755-1834), explores the impact of his pioneering work.

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Section form probably the most important illuminated manuscript of the 15th century, illustrating the various activities undertaken by the Duke’s court and his peasants according to the month of the year, each with a celestial hemisphere of a solar chariot and appropriate zodiac signs.

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A book from 1907 detailing the science behind harmony, balance, and rhythm in art, full of illustrative diagrams. The author, Denman Waldo Ross (1853-1935), was an American painter, art collector, and professor of art at Harvard University.

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Universal Newsreel from 1933 showing Cecil H. Dill, a farmer from Michigan, demonstrating his ability to render popular melodies by pressing his hands together. After the performance Dill modestly tells how he discovered his unusual talent while staring rather intensely into the camera.

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At a dinner party in 1889, Browning tries to recite his ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’. Unfortunately, he “cannot remember me own verses”. A playback of the recording the following year on the 1st anniversary of his death was said to be the first time anyone’s voice "had been heard from beyond the grave".

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Weird and wonderful characters from the past and Georgian-present, including Daniel Lambert, a gaol keeper and animal breeder from Leicester, famous for his unusually large size, and the Polish-born 3-foot 3-inch Józef Boruwłaski who toured in European and Turkish courts.

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An early example from 1900 of 'special effects' from the Edison Manufacturing Company, with the objects a cartoonist draws springing to life, jumping out from the paper into the artist's hands. Musical accompaniment by Philip Carli.

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Eddie Peabody, referred to as “King of the Banjo”, plays a 1925 rearrangement for the banjo of Austrian composer Franz von Suppé’s “Poet and Peasant Overture” originally dating from 1846.

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An account given to the Royal Society in 1753 of a meteorite sighting: “I was then going down the hill adjoining to the south side of Hornsey-church, and was not a little surprised to find myself suddenly surrounded by a light equal to that of the full moon, though the moon (which was then four days old) had been set about fifty minutes.”

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The celebrities of 19th century France by French photographer Félix Nadar (real name Gaspard-Félix Tournachon). As well as photography Nadar also made a name for himself as a keen balloonist and became the inspiration for the character of Michael Ardan in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.

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Collection of little snippets from Shakespeare’s plays pertaining to the natural world: Garden Flowers, Wild Flowers, Weeds, Trees, Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs, Spices and Medicines, Grain, Birds, Animals, Fish, Reptiles, and Insects.

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Recording made by Thomas A. Edison on August 12, 1927, at the Golden Jubilee of the Phonograph ceremony. In this recording Edison demonstrates how in 1877 he made the first record on his tinfoil phonograph, a recording which no longer exists.

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“Who frets about the mystery / Enshrouding all of history / On reading this will, maybe, see / We’ve made it plain as ABC.” From Alexander The Great, “a victim of fate”, to Zenobia, “the empress of Palmyra” – an illustrated ABC set to verse of history’s big players (at least as envisaged in 1905).

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Remarkable collection of 'still life' displays from the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch. These carefully arranged scenes blurred the boundary between the demonstrative element of scientific preservation and the symbolic and allegorical of vanitas art.

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Book from 1852 by Dr James Bower Harrison, a delightful tour through the world of the dying and the dead in Victorian England.

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Murderous pigs sent to the gallows, sparrows prosecuted for chattering in Church, a gang of thieving rats let off on a wholly technical acquittal - theoretical psychologist and author Nicholas Humphrey explores the strange world of medieval animal trials.

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Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and author of Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court, on the strange case of the feral child found in the woods in northern Germany and brought to live in the court of George I.

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Dogs who shop, bury frogs, and take 800-mile solo round trips by rail - writer and broadcaster Frank Key gives a brief tour of the strange and delightful Dog Stories from The Spectator.

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Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615), also known as Giovanni Battista Della Porta and John Baptist Porta, was an Italian scholar, polymath and playwright who lived in Naples at the time of the Scientific Revolution and Reformation. These are pages from his book on physiognomy.

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Minnie the Moocher defined Betty’s character as a teenager of a modern era, at odds with the old world ways of her parents. The cartoon features a performance of Cab Calloway’s famous song “Minnie the Moocher” sung by a ghostly walrus rotoscoped from live-action footage of Calloway.

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An exploration into all beasts fabled, fabricated, fantastical, and fanciful, from across the world, including the Chinese and Japanese Dragon, Unicorn, Phoenix, and the spate of Sea Serpent’s sighted off the 19th century New England coast.

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Images from a 1671 book on the Americas, depicting the "Quality of the Shores, Islands, Cities, Fortresses, Towns, Temples, Mountains, Sources, Rivers, Houses, the nature of Beasts, Trees, Plants and foreign Crops, Religion and Manners, Miraculous Occurrences, Old and New Wars”.

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Thomas Browne's seminal diptych, exploring themes of death, immortality, and the interconnection of art, nature and the Universe via numerous symbols. George Saintsbury called Hydriotaphia “the longest piece, perhaps, of absolutely sublime rhetoric to be found in the prose literature of the world.”

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Between 1617 and 1621 the English physician and polymath Robert Fludd published his masterwork Utriusque Cosmi, a book split into two volumes and packed with over 60 intricate engravings. Urszula Szulakowska explores the philosophical and theological ideas behind the extraordinary images found in the second part of the work.

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In 1890 Henry Adams – the historian, academic, journalist, and descendent of two US presidents – set out on a tour of the South Pacific. After befriending the family of “the last Queen of Tahiti,” he became inspired to write what is considered to be the first history of the island. Through Adams’ letters, Ray Davis explores the story of the book’s creation.

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In 1741 the Norwegian-Danish author Ludvig Holberg published Klimii Iter Subterraneum, a satirical science-fiction/fantasy novel detailing the adventures of its hero Niels Klim in a utopian society existing beneath the surface of the earth. Peter Fitting, author of Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology, explores Holberg's book in the wider context of the hollow earth theory.

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Weather scientist Keith C. Heidorn takes a look at the life and work of Wilson Bentley, a self-educated farmer from a small American town who, by combining a bellows camera with a microscope, managed to photograph the dizzyingly intricate and diverse structures of the snow crystal.

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Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, explores what we can still learn from the life and music of Franz Liszt.

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A selection of World War II aerial photographs collected from Wikimedia Commons, including the Allied bombing of Hamburg, scenes from Operation Market Garden, and overhead views of Birkenau extermination camp in Poland.

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José Ferrer received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his starring performance as Cyrano de Bergerac, the charismatic swordsman-poet with the absurd nose and “crowned with the white plume freedom”. Based on the 1897 French Alexandrine verse drama by Edmond Rostand, using poet Brian Hooker’s 1923 English blank verse translation as the basis for its screenplay.

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Dominicus Custos (1560 – 1612), was a Flemish artist, printer and copperplate engraver, who specialised in depicting notable figures of his time – producing books akin to a 16th century “Who’s Who”.

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Recording made on 30th July 1890 to raise money for the impoverished veterans of the Charge of the Light Brigade: ‘When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore.’

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1882 lecture given by pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge at the Royal Institution in London in which he described his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the film strip.

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Julie Gardham, Senior Assistant Librarian at University of Glasgow's Special Collections Department, takes a look at the book that was said to have spurred a young Isaac Newton onto the scientific path, The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate.

Considered by many to be D.W. Griffith's masterpiece, and indeed the greatest film of the whole silent era. Griffith's epic film consists of four distinct but parallel stories that demonstrated mankind’s intolerance during four different ages in world history. A colossal undertaking filled with monumental sets, lavish period costumes, and more than 3,000 extras.

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The voice of Santa via Ernest Hare from 1925. Hare’s recording career began when he became Al Jolson’s understudy in the Broadway musical Sinbad in 1919. He gained fame with Billy Jones as “The Happiness Boys” and by 1928 they were the highest-paid singers in radio earning $1,250 a week.

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The writings of the Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir are known for their scientific acumen as well as for their rhapsodic flights. Terry Gifford, author of *Reconnecting with John Muir*, explores Muir's multifaceted engagement with 'God's big show'.

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100 years ago, on 14 December 1911, a Norwegian team led by the explorer Roald Amundsen became the first humans to reach the South Pole, just five weeks ahead of the doomed British party led by Robert Falcon Scott. Here are a selection of images from Amundsen's account of the epic trek.

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Delightful little book from 1910 packed full of christmas recitations, monologues, drills, tableaux, motion songs, exercises, dialogues and plays. According to the introduction "Precision of movement is the keynote of success for everything of this kind".

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When he died in 1921 the singer Enrico Caruso left behind him approximately 290 commercially released recordings, and a significant mark upon on the opera world including more than 800 appearances at the New York Met. John Potter, singer and author of Tenor: History of a Voice, explores Caruso's popular appeal and how he straddled the divide between 'pop' and 'classical'.

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This week sees the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, one of the deadliest peacetime disasters at sea. Richard Howells, author of The Myth of the Titanic, explores the various legends surrounding the world's most famous ship.

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In 1585 the Englishman John White, governor of one of the very first North American colonies, made a series of exquisite watercolour sketches of the native Algonkin people alongside whom the settlers would try to live. Benjamin Breen explores the significance of the sketches and their link to the mystery of what became known as the "Lost Colony".

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An Aztec codex, detailing military conquests and daily routine, created about twenty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the intent that it be seen by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. En route to its commissioner it was stolen by the French, and finally ended up in a library in England:

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Flowers in an English garden become players in Walter Crane's beautifully illustrated fantastical verse from 1899. Crane is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation and one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif.

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Julian Barnes on when a young Guy de Maupassant was invited to lunch at the holiday cottage of Algernon Swinburne. A flayed human hand, pornography, the serving of monkey meat, and inordinate amounts of alcohol, all made for a truly strange Anglo-French encounter.

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In 1906 the American physician and neurologist Henry Morton Prince published his remarkable monograph The Dissociation of a Personality in which he details the condition of ‘Sally Beauchamp’, America’s first famous multiple-personality case. The writer George Prochnik discusses the life and thought of the man Freud called “an unimaginable ass”.

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The poet Christopher Smart – also known as “Kit Smart”, “Kitty Smart”, “Jack Smart” and, on occasion, “Mrs Mary Midnight” – was a well known figure in 18th century London. Nowadays he is perhaps best known for considering his cat Jeoffry. Writer and broadcaster Frank Key looks at Smart’s weird and wonderful Jubilate Agno.

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A selection of beautifully illuminated Breviary pages from various unknown miniaturists working in and around Paris, Bruges and Gent in the middle of the 15th century. A breviary (from Latin brevis, ‘short’ or ‘concise’) is a book of the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church.

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Homer's Iliad set to bawdy verse by Thomas Bridges (c.1710-c.1775), originally published in 1762 under the pseudonym Caustic Barebones. The work achieved some popularity, and was reprinted several times, the last in 1797.

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A fantastic new collection recently uploaded by the Prelinger Archive to the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Digitized into HD from 35mm original negatives and release prints dating back to the first decade of the 20th century, these unedited sequences were shot for feature films but never used.

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Diagrams from Geometrical psychology, or, The science of representation: an abstract of the theories and diagrams of B. W. Betts (1887) by Louisa S. Cook, which details New Zealander Benjamin Bett’s remarkable attempts to mathematically model the evolution of human consciousness through geometric forms.

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A rather dark and bizarre Edison short from 1904. Two men are operating a ‘dog factory’, using a device that they call the Dog Transformator, which turns dogs into sausages for a new customer to choose and turn back into a dog.

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Catalogue from 1901 detailing Mme Tussaud’s non-waxwork collection, including such gems as the cravat Charles I wore on on his execution morning, a lock of Napoleon's hair, and the shrunken head of a South American chief.

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In March 2011, Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, a specialist dealer in fine and rare antiquarian cartography and historic maps, donated their collection of over 2000 digital images to Wikimedia Commons. Here is just a small selection of a really great collection.

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In 1924 California’s Tribune-American newspaper ran a competition for its readers to write in with their most unusual dreams, the winning entry being made into a short film - this is the winner, a strange tale of a mother losing her baby.

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Andrew McConnell Stott, author of The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, introduces the life and memoirs of the most famous and celebrated of English clowns.

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Collection of love poems by James Joyce, originally published by Elkin Matthews in May, 1907, the same year he refused Joyce’s manuscript for Dubliners, and mostly written before he first ‘stepped out’ with his wife to be Nora in 16 June 1904.

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Plates illustrating a 17th century anatomical work by the Belgian physician Adriaan Van Spiegel about the formation of the foetus in the womb. The engravings are the work of Titian's student Odoardo Fialetti (1573-1638), and engraver, Francesco Valesio (b. ca. 1560).

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In the 82 illustrated plates included in his 1680 book *The Anatomy of Plants*, the English botanist Nehemiah Grew revealed for the first time the inner structure and function of plants in all their splendorous intricacy. Brian Garret, professor of philosophy at McMaster Univerity, explores how Grew's pioneering 'mechanist' vision in relation to the floral world paved the way for the science of plant anatomy.

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A naughty little skit from 1901 filmed by the Edison company.

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With its novel vignettes and its use of a camera obscura in the production of the plates, William Cheselden’s Osteographia, is recognized as a landmark in the history of anatomical illustration. Monique Kornell looks at its unique blend of accuracy and elegance.

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16th century illuminations by Stanislaw Samostrzelnik for The Catalogue of the Archbishops of Gniezno and Lives of the Bishops of Cracow, a 16th century manuscript by the Polish priest, soldier and chronicler Jan Długosz.

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John Huston documentary commissioned by the US army to record their efforts to take Italy in the Battle of San Pietro Infine in 1943. The US Army ended up refusing to show the film because it was too honest in its portrayal of the high cost of battle and the difficulties faced.

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An “Alphabetical Index to Type Faces” from the G.A. Davis Printing Company. Full of bizarre ‘accidental’ sentences such as “Summer-time with outdoor pleasures become flowers with nature”, and “Domestic animals are nuisance when a hurry to men”.

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Until the discovery of an 1860 recording of “Au clair de la lune” in 2009, this haunting excerpt from Handel’s oratorio recorded in 1888 was the oldest known recorded human voice in existence. A note on the cylinder reads: “A chorus of 4000 voices recorded with phonograph over 100 yards away”.

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Found among his personal possessions after the defeat of his army at Leipzig in 1813, Napoleon's Oraculum (or Book of Fate) was apparently consulted by the emperor "before every important occasion". Based on a text originally discovered in one of the Royal tombs of Egypt during a French military expedition of 1801.

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Bizarre short film from Calvin Communications, in which they satirise their own formulaic approach to industrial promotional films, showing how the idea of the "American Dream" is utilised to sell products.

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In the 1970′s the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed and a number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made.

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Directed by Robert Wiene, this is one of the most influential of German Expressionist films and often considered one of the greatest horror movies of the silent era – notable for having introduced the ‘twist ending’ in cinema and for its weird and distorted set design.

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The Nazi-sponsored German propaganda swing band were broadcast on short-wave to British listeners every Wednesday and Saturday at at 9pm during WW2. The songs stressed how badly the war was going for the target audience, and how it was only going to be a matter of time before they would be beaten. Apparently, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was a big fan.

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Short future history novel from John Ames Mitchell (1845–1918). First published in 1889, it is the fictional journal of Persian admiral Khan-Li, who in the year 2951 rediscovers North America by sailing across the Atlantic.

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In 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, the first ever book that could be described as ‘mathematical fiction’. Ian Stewart, author of Flatterland and The Annotated Flatland, introduces the strange tale of the geometric adventures of A. Square.

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When Captain James Riley published in 1817 the account of his and his crew's capture and enslavement at the hands of a group of North African tribesmen it became an immediate hit, readers being enthralled by this stark reversal of the usual master-slave narrative they were all so used to. Robert C. Davis looks at the story in the context of other similar tales of Europeans being taken as slaves on the North African coast.

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Filmed 11 years after independence from Italian colonial rule and 7 years before a group of military officers led by a 28 year old Muammar al-Gaddafi staged a coup d’état against King Idris bringing the monarchy to an end and beginning Gadaffi’s 42 year rule.

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Centering around the creation of a substance called “apergy”, a form of anti-gravitational energy, Percy Gregg’s 1880 novel details a flight to Mars. Notable as containing probably the first alien language to be described in detail, it also contains possibly the first instance of the word “Astronaut”, the name of the narrator’s spacecraft.

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Swashbuckler film from 1924 directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Douglas Fairbanks, telling the story of a thief who falls in love with the daughter of the Caliph. The film is dripping with special effects of the period (flying carpet, magic urn and fearsome monsters) and features massive Arabian-style sets.

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On the run from the Nazis in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin committed suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou. In 2011, over 70 years later, his writings enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Anca Pusca, author of Walter Benjamin: The Aesthetics of Change, reflects on the relevance of Benjamin's oeuvre in a digital age, and the implications of his work becoming freely available online.

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On 21st November 1811, on a lake's edge near Potsdam, a 34 year old Kleist shot himself dead in a suicide pact with his terminally ill lover. He left behind him just under a decade of intense literary output which has established him as one of the most important writers of the German romantic period. On the bicentenary of his death, Kleist scholar Steven Howe explores the importance of his first dramatic work and how in it can be seen the themes of his later masterpieces.

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A very curious little book concerning a poet named Uriah Jewett, a sea serpent, the disappearance of a cheat named Hoyt, and the possible illegitimate child of Prince Arthur born in the forests of Canada.

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La Vie et la passion de Jesus Christ is a 1903 French silent film directed by Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca, and is believed to be the first feature film to have colourised sequences. Features a wonderfully thespian Jesus in the lead role.

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Illustrations from the The Kitab al-Bulhan, or Book of Wonders, an Arabic manuscript dating mainly from the late 14th century A.D. made up of astrological, astronomical and geomantic texts compiled by Abd al-Hasan Al-Isfahani.

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Nicholas Tromans, author of Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, takes a look at Dadd's most famous painting The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.

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A century on from his dramatic death on the way back from the South Pole, the memory of the explorer Captain Scott and his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition is stronger than ever. Max Jones explores the role that the iconic visual record has played in keeping the legend alive.

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