Historians have combed through centuries of photographs of wheelchairs and discovered that not one of them contains the 32nd President of the United States.
“We went through entire archives of catalogues, manufacturer websites and even stock images,” said historian Andrea Balkan. “Either the chairs are all empty or they show someone who is definitively not Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
This revelation shocked scholars of American history. Written records indicate that a wheelchair did once carry FDR, though the make and model are unspecified. One would assume from the amount of photographs of wheelchairs that at least one would show FDR.
“Perhaps the wheelchair wanted to keep FDR hidden and only carried him in private,” suggested Balkan. “Or it didn’t want to seem overly prestigious. We can only guess.”
The researchers went further and bought large swathes of collected social media data in case someone happened to have posted a picture of a wheelchair with a visible FDR.
“We used an algorithm to detect wheelchairs in the photos and then manually went through each one of them,“ said Balkan. “Nothing. We even tried looking at electric wheelchairs that didn’t exist when FDR was alive. Just in case.”
They did find a few pictures of a wheelchair with FDR, but it was abundantly clear that those photos were AI-generated.