The Most Famous Person You Would Never Recognize in a Photo

Think of the most famous people of the past 100 years:  Einstein, Churchill, Gandhi.  All of them, and hundreds more, are instantly recognizable from their photos:

So here is a question to ponder: who is the most famous person of the past century whom most people would never recognize from a photo? I have a nominee -- it's this guy:

Do you recognize him? Who is it? I'm being a little unfair here, as he became famous at a much younger age. Try this photo instead:

Time to guess: who are we talking about?

And the answer is.......






Neil Armstrong. The fact that he's not instantly recognizable is a tribute to the low profile he maintained after the Moon landing in 1969. I was inspired to post this after watching the recent film First Man (which is excellent, by the way). It's always fun to see how closely the actors portraying historical figures resemble the real-life people. But in this case, I realized that I had no idea what Neil Armstrong actually looked like in real life!