Welcome to this month’s Time Travel Nexus Investigates! At TTNI, we’re playing detective, hunting the TTTs (time-travelling tourists), and attempting to solve some much-talked-about cases of real-life time travel.
So… did a TTT pay a visit to the reopening of a Canadian bridge in 1941?
Origin of the claim
In 2004 a photo was made available to the public in the “Their Past Lives Here” exhibit at the Bralorne-Pioneer Museum in British Columbia, Canada. The photo was black and white and showed a crowd of spectators at an event. On the back was a note stating that it was taken in 1941 at the reopening of the South Fork Bridge in British Columbia. Nobody knows who took the photo. The identity of the people in the photo is also unknown.
In 2010 the museum digitised the collection and placed it online. At this point several internet users picked up on an oddity in the bridge photo. Websites such as “Fark”, “BoingBoing” and “Forgetomori” got wind of the mystery and started republishing the photo with headlines like “Time traveller caught in a 1940s photo?”
A 21st-century time travel urban legend was born.
Nature of the claim
The claim relates to one man captured in the crowd attending the bridge reopening. A man who looks, shall we say, out of place. His appearance is too modern to fit with the 1940s setting. He’s wearing a modern t-shirt and modern sunglasses and he’s brandishing a camera that’s too small to have existed in 1941.
His appearance among men and women dressed much more formally and in keeping with the era has led him to get dubbed the “time-travelling hipster”. Time travel conspiracy theorists and urban legend believers contend that the man was an imposter sent from the future to take photos of the South Fork Bridge for an unknown purpose.
So — was he REALLY a TTT?
The evidence
We must first prove that the photo is genuine and that the modern man has not been inserted into it for shits and giggles using Photoshop.
The first piece of evidence to support that its authenticity is this second photo, shown below. This is a photo of the same event but from a different angle and was discovered shortly after the first one went viral. It is part of the John Wihksne Collection and is captioned, “Opening of the new (1941) bridge at South Fork”.
This close-up shows the same modern-looking man from the original photo.
It would be a stretch, albeit not impossible, to say that both photographs are fakes, given their differing origins. However, there is further evidence of the original photograph’s authenticity. In December 2010, Evgeni Balamutenko and his colleague from Russian television channel NTV located the original photo at the Bralorne-Pioneer Museum. With the help of a museum staffer, they determined that it was real and unedited (as shown in the video below).
So this man was definitely there at the bridge that day, which means he must be a TTT… right?
Wrong, unfortunately. Snopes.com has revealed that although the man was dressed much more casually than the other people around him, there was nothing on him that wasn’t readily available in the 1940s.
The first point is that wrap-around glasses with protective side-shields were available, but simply weren’t popular or widespread. The second is that his t-shirt is believed to bear the logo of the Montreal Maroons, a National Hockey League team that was around until 1938 (which means it was more likely that someone would be wearing the t-shirt back then than today or in the future). Finally, Kodak were producing cameras of that size and type in 1941.
And that, as they say, is that. The hipster’s attire is not evidence of time travel, just an unusual fashion sense.
Another TTNI case solved! And once again, evidence of TTTs in our midst is not forthcoming.
(That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop looking for them though 😉 )
Next month: I’m tackling the world’s most famous time slip case — the “Ghosts of Versailles”
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Hi, C.R. I’m looking forward to the Ghosts of Versailles. And here’s another lead for you to follow up:
https://twitter.com/DapperHistorian/status/1008747174136549377
But the logo isn’t exactly the same..daah..
The ridged, crinkled edge of photo is a sign of the times. True all the way up to the 1960s. Although a bit more rounded saw toothed edges by then. Ask any oldster.