13
in the mid-1880s. The earliest known air photograph
from a balloon taken in Canada was taken in 1883 via
remote control by Royal Engineer Captain Henry Esdale
in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in August 1883. This image is a
vertical, not an oblique, perspective from an altitude of
1,500 feet. Upon his return to England he continued to
experiment with balloon photography. The English pho-
tographer C.V. Shadbolt also took vertical photographs
of London from a balloon in 1883. J.M. Bacon credits
himself and J. N. Maskelyne with patenting a late 19th
century (prior to 1902) aerial photography invention: “a
small captive [balloon], carrying aloft a photographic
camera directed and operated electrically from the
ground.” By the early 1890s with even more sensitive
dry plates and smaller cameras, photographers such as
Philadelphia’s William Nicholson Jennings boasted of
excellent results given the right weather conditions and
a tethered balloon.
Besides its use as a novel viewpoint for photogra-
phers adventurous to take fl ight, there were three main
categories of aerial photography from balloons: survey-
ing, military observation and exploration, including
scientifi c observation. François Jean Dominique Arago,
the man who publicly announced Daguerre’s invention,
fi rst referred to the use of photography in 1840 for
mapmaking or phototopography. Nadar around 1853
connected the use of balloons for aerial surveying or
aerial photogrammetry. The fi rst successful experiments
in photo topography were conducted in 1849 by Colonel
Aimé Laussedat (1819–1907), a French army engineer.
Laussedat, simultaneously but separately from Nadar’s
promotional work with aerial photography by balloon,
experimented with aerial surveying using kites and bal-
loons. At the Exposition Universelle, Paris in 1867 he
exhibited the fi rst map compiled from a stereographic
aerial image. Laussedat’s work, along with that of
other surveyor innovators in the 1860s and 1870s, was
extended by the Canadian Dominion Lands Surveyor
General, E.G.D. Deville (1849–1924) in the mid-1880s.
He published the fi rst book about the subject, Photo-
graphic Surveying in 1889. His technique later proved
far more effi cient than traditional survey methods dur-
ing an early 1890s international boundary survey in the
southeast Alaska mountains. The term “photogramme-
try” was coined in 1893 by Dr. Albrecht Meydenbaur
(1834–1921). C.B. Adams, a U.S. Army offi cer, was
granted a patent in 1893 for an aerial photogrammetry
method involving two balloons and cameras to produceBlack, James Wallace. “Boston, as the
Eagle and the Wild Goose See It.”
Courtesy: The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase,
Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee
Gift, 2005 (2005, 100.87) image. © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.