I know, I know...
Lionfish at 20m (60 feet) on the reef in Cozumel, Mexico |
This is the Nth time we've looked for the "first photo of X"--but I noticed something very different in this Challenge. As we've noticed before, even very simple questions sometimes bring up unexpected surprises and issues. That's the case with this week's very simple question.
I started searching for the earliest photos I could find taken in Cozumel. Easy, right? Turns out there are interesting issues here. See if you can spot the biggest issue and work around it!
This week's SearchResearch Challenge isn't hard, but I think it's an important one that speaks to the future of doing online research. Let's figure it out together.
1. What is the earliest / oldest photograph you can find that was taken on Cozumel?
If you do the obvious query, this is what you'll see on Google:
That's pretty disappointing. It's a really interesting idea, but I am very skeptical of the claim that these Mayan "images" are from projections of sunlight onto the limestone walls in Cozumel. To quote from the summary:
"The discovery suggests that the Mayans were able to project images and record them on stone tablets."
What? Really? That's a wild claim. So I thought I'd try Bing search--only to find this:
What is going on here? Did the Mayans really invent a precursor to photography 1000 years ago?
A little bit of digging into the links below each of these results reveals that the SOURCE of these remarkable claims is this page from "This is Cozumel" tourist web site.
Check out the date: It's April 1, 2014. The whole article is an April Fool's joke.
As we know, search engines and LLMs are notoriously bad at humor and satire. (See this article "How satire crippled Google's most powerful AI.") And this is a great example of the LLMs not understanding humor, but presenting it as fact. Both Google and Bing got it terribly wrong.
I then tried Gemini, and got a better answer:
This is actually pretty interesting. For fun, I also tried this query on Claude:
(I tried Perplexity as well and got a similar result. This is a good sign.)
The most interesting thing here is the mention of Augustus Le Plongeon and his wife, Alice, who visited the Yucatán and Cozumel in the 1870s. Now THAT is a useful lead for us SRSers. (It's worth reading their Wikipedia page. What an adventurous couple!)
I did the obvious searches, e.g. this one and similar:
[ Le Plongeon Cozumel photographs OR photo ]
and quickly learned that the best resource for this Challenge were the books that they'd published (or were written about them).
As you know, Google Books is a great resource, but once again the Internet Archive (Archive.org) is a fabulous resource:
Notice that I did a search on Archive.org searching the full text (and not just the metadata). This led me to a happy morning of reading several books that were published about the Le Plongeons travels in Mexico.
Example: I read through Lawrence Desmond's book, Yucatán through Her Eyes: Alice Dixon Le Plongeon,Writer & Expeditionary Photographer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009. In there I found that:
“In early February, [1877] they decided to leave Isla Mujeres and sail for Cozumel Island, about seventy-five miles south of Isla Mujeres and ten miles off the coast. Today the island is a tourist destination complete with an international airport, but in the 1870s only a few travelers visited the island, and Alice noted it had only “five hundred inhabitants” (ADLP 1886a:28).” Page 222.
In that book, on page 90, you'll find a 1876 photo of several large axes and flint spear heads on page 90. So they're clearly taking photos on Cozumel in 1876.
Then, in the book: The Mayas, the sources of their history. Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, his account of discoveries, by Salisbury, Stephen you'll find several letters from Le Plongeon in 1877, written from Cozumel and commenting that they left Cozumel in 1879.
Finally, after lots of scanning around through various books, I landed on Here and there in the Yucatan Alice D. Le Plongeon. (1889) On page 36 you'll find this photo:
P/C Wikimedia. From the book "Here and There in the Yucatan" by Alice Le Plongeon. |
The book was published in 1889, but the photo was probably taken in 1876 or 1877 when the Le Plongeons were visiting Cozumel.
If you remember from earlier discussions, photography was invented in 1822, and the first real photos started coming out in 1826.
So I'm pretty sure this is the one of the first photos taken on Cozumel.
SearchResearch Lessons
1. Don't believe everything you read. LLMs can be (as we've seen multiple times) misled by all kinds of things, including humor. If you see something extraordinary, check it out in detail.
2. Look at what you find and use names of people / places as leads. Here I used the Le Plongeons as a way to find the earliest photos of Cozumel. (I admit that I got lucky here. But the point remains: leverage what you learn.)
3. Books can be immensely valuable! That might seem obvious, but I often talk with searchers who give up because they can't find a web page with the information they seek.
4. Use Archive.org for your book research. It’s really worthwhile getting an account at Archive.org so you can read the full text (with images) of the books you seek.
Keep searching!