The power of such technology to spy on adversaries or help warn of incoming nuclear attack was not lost on the leaders of the era. The United States and the Soviet Union’s efforts to outpace one another’s aerospace achievements led directly to the development of satellite imagery, the ultimate in unmanned aerial photography. 24, 1946 by a captured Nazi rocket launched from New Mexico. The first known photo from space, depicting a glimpse of Earth, was taken on Oct. The end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War brought even further advancements to aerial photography, particularly thanks to the Space Race. Margaret Bourke-White-The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images ![]() ![]() began to experiment with rudimentary drone aircraft, like the TDR-1, though that was an attack aircraft rather than an imaging platform. It was also during this conflict the U.S. attack on Tunis, as the magazine declared in its Mar. combat crew over enemy soil” when she covered the U.S. Famed LIFE photographer Margaret Bourke-White became “the first woman ever to fly with a U.S. It was during World War II that wartime aerial images and video became commonplace in newspapers, magazines and movie theater newsreels on the homefront. Later advancements in both aviation and photography meant flight crews could go farther and come back with more useful images, which were often used to reveal enemy movements or plan future attacks. Cameras were equipped on all manner of aircraft, and the wartime practice of aerial reconnaissance was born. World War I consumed the world shortly thereafter, and military commanders soon saw the potential advantage offered by up-to-date aerial imagery of the battlefield. Fox, director of The Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment and co-author of Photography and Flight. “At this signal the picture was taken, the kites were pulled down and the camera reloaded.” Syndicated in newspapers nationwide, Lawrence’s images were “at the least, a very early example of an aerial news shot - and perhaps the first,” says William L. “Exposures were made by electric current carried through the insulated core of the steel cable kiteline the moment the shutter snapped, a small parachute was released,” explained Beaumont Newhall, the Museum of Modern Art’s first photography curator, in Airborne Camera: The World from the Air and Outer Space. His most famous such photograph captured the damage caused by the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire he used 17 kites to suspend a camera 2,000 feet in the air to record the image. George Lawrence later perfected a method of taking panoramas from above by strapping large-format cameras with curved film plates to kites. James Wallace Black-Metropolitan Museum of Art James Wallace Black’s 1860 aerial photograph taken from tethered hot air balloon Queen of the Air 2,000 feet above Boston is the oldest surviving aerial photograph. ![]() Gaspar Felix Tournachon, more commonly known as “Nadar,” is credited with taking the first successful aerial photograph in 1858 from a hot air balloon tethered 262 feet over Petit-Bicêtre (now Petit-Clamart), just outside Paris his original photos have been lost. It wasn’t long after commercial photography was invented in the mid-19th century before “adventurous amateurs” launched cameras into the sky using balloons, kites and even rockets, according to Paula Amad’s 2012 overview of the history of aerial photography, published in the journal History of Photography. And in some surprising ways, the history of aerial photography dovetails with the last century of human history more broadly. For hundreds of years, airborne cameras have made awe-inspiring images of our planet, revealed the devastating scale of natural disasters, and tipped the scales in combat. But they are only the latest development in a long history of aerial photography. Drones are often celebrated for their ability to capture a new vantage point on the world, revealing the beauty of our planet from high above.
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