JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 891

I suddenly found myself with a short virtual stack of interesting early-century photos featuring examinations of one sort or another.  There’s nothing here for exams at school (which makes me think about when the first graded school test was invented), but there are some other interesting images of exams.

For example, there’s this odd picture of two guys inspecting the installation of a voting booth in Chicago in 1905.  There’s nothing wrong with this, no sir, not since we’re in Chicago, which never has had any sort of voting irregularity–perhaps that’s why I get such a creepy feeling from this image.

This picture has everything going for it in a fabulous way, from the poses of the tester and the examiner (who is standing in a Hitchcockian manner, a thin man in a fat man pose) to the row of cups, to the size of the spittoon, to the slightly dirty and occasionally chipped cups, to the title of the whole thing.  Mincing Lane.  I understand and commend the need for quality control, but the picture does have its odd elements.  (I’d like to know the name of the interpids pictured here; or, rather, their nicknames.)

Evidently the men aboard the USS Brooklyn  had little to do during unspecified doldrums than to watch and critique the ship’s barber.

Then there are the professional barber-and-haircut-watchers, shown here at a barbering school examination in 1903:  five crowded chairs and a few men in hats.

The big, white, filled-but-lonely room at Ellis Island, where you either got in, got quarantined, or got sent back home.

I’m not sure what this nurse is doing.

This nurse is administering an exam to a newcomer at one of the American Japanese internment/prison camps sometime around 1943.

There are undoubtedly many more of course, but that’s the lot available on the desktop right now.