Thanks to Jean-Claude Latombe, French-American roboticist and the Kumagai Professor Emeritus in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, lazy folks like us who don't count visiting the National Archives as a weekend pastime, now have another source of insight into Singapore's recent past.

The 69-year-old retired professor, who has authored one of the most highly-cited books in the field of robot motion planning, posted on his Stanford blog a series of haunting photos he captured while on a trip to Southeast Asia in 1972:

I visited Singapore for the first time during the summer of 1972, as part of a longer trip that also took me to Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. At that time Singapore was a fairly new country, as it had gained independence from Malaysia on August 9, 1965. It was very different from what it is today, as one can see from the following pictures: not as opulent, not as clean, ... I have always liked and I still like Singapore, but I nevertheless regret some its previous charm.

Apart from Southeast Asia, it appears Latombe is an avid traveler, having visited practically every inhabitable continent save Antarctica.

He is also a serial mountaineer, having conquered some of the world's most daunting trails and peaks (such as Nepal's 8,485-metre tall Makalu, currently the fifth highest mountain in the world).

Not quite what you'd expect from a professor of robotics, artificial intelligence, motion planning, computational structural biology... you get the drift.

In any case, it sometimes does take an outsider to show us what we've been missing all this while:

The Singapore River, circa 1972

The Merlion (then, without the surrounding park)

Old Streets

For more photos, visit Jean-Claude Latombe's blog here.

Top photo by Jean-Claude Latombe.

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