In 1949, LIFE magazine sent famed photographer Nina Leen to document the daily life of a sassy troupe of young women who had run off and joined the famous Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, Fla. What developed was a portrait of a sisterhood formed over acrobatics that mixed high-flying wire acts with fashionable high-waisted shorts. Sarasota was once considered “the home of the American circus”. Here: an aerialist smoking while rehearsing for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, FL in 1949. (Photo By Nina Leen/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Gas-masked men of the British Machine Gun Corps with a Vickers machine gun during the first battle of the Somme, 1916. (Photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images)

Pfc. Sebastian Rodriguez, machine gunner, Weapons Platoon, Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, Marine Rotational Force – Darwin, fires an M240 machine gun during a night squad-attack exercise, here, May 22, 2013. (Photo by Sgt. Sarah Fiocco/U.S. Marines)

Florence Welch of Florence And The Machine performs at Spark Arena on January 30, 2019 in Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo by Dave Simpson/WireImage)

A dog dressed as a Zoltar fortune telling machine participates in the Halloween Dog Parade in New York. (Photo by Timothy Clary/Getty Images)

Fire blows from a fogging machine as a worker sprays fumigation vapour to stem the spread of dengue virus along a street in Peshawar, Pakistan, October 18, 2021. (Photo by Fayaz Aziz/Reuters)

People look at the “Dragon de Calais” by Francois Delaroziere and La compagnie La Machine during a rehearsal in the harbour of Calais, France on October 30, 2019. (Photo by Pascal Rossignol/Reuters)

Francisco da Silva Vale, 61, cools off fish with ice produced on solar-powered ice machines at Vila Nova do Amana community in the Sustainable Development Reserve, in Amazonas state, Brazil, September 23, 2015. Three solar-powered machines, are producing about ninety kilos of ice per day, in a region with poor access to electric energy, which used to be produced only with diesel oil, in the Amazon rain forest. (Photo by Bruno Kelly/Reuters)