When an image "goes viral" it means that something about the image is compelling, intriguing, or bizarre, which inspires numerous people to share it with others. Sometimes these images are humorous. Sometimes they're shocking. But it's relatively common for them to also be fake because hoaxers purposefully try to create dramatic, attention-grabbing scenes that people will want to share. They do this by changing or distorting an element within a photo, or by recaptioning 'real' images to make them tell a more interesting story.

Fake viral images have become a hallmark of the Internet. But if we look back through history, it's possible to find fake images spreading in a viral fashion even in the late 19th century, when photos circulated via picture postcards or in magazines. So the phenomenon is older than most people might assume.

The images in this gallery are arranged in descending chronological order, starting with the present and going all the way back to the 1860s. The date on each image indicates when, to the best of our knowledge, it first went viral.