Have you ever sat back and wondered, “Who thought of that first?”…
Here at OEM Cameras we are always eager to find out the origins of technologies that we provide cameras for. While looking into the use of cameras for aerial purposes, we’ve discovered that people have been integrating cameras into their aerial projects since the eighteen hundreds!
| In 1858 balloonist Felix Nadar pioneered the skies becoming the first person to take aerial photographs since the invention of the camera. He took to his balloon floating over the cities in France snapping landscape images of the scenes below. After Nadar’s experiments many followed in his footsteps attaching cameras to kites and unmanned balloons – thus igniting curiosity of the skies above. |
In 1907, Julius Neubronner took aerial photography one step further when he created Pigeon Photography, which involved strapping a light weight timed camera to trained homing pigeons. The camera was attached to a harness which fit around the bird’s neck and back. As a bird would fly the camera would snap photos at different time increments, shortly after the pigeon would return to Neubronner who would then develop the film.
Neubronner’s patent for the harness was declined but then granted in 1908 once German military took interest in the technology. The Germans saw great potential in using the birds as War Pigeons to aide in battlefield studies for both WWI and WWII.
The War Pigeons were proven useful, however the invention of the airplane was blossoming in the United States which would advance aerial photography and change the course of the War.
It has been over one hundred and fifty years since then and we are still working on improving aerial photography, video and surveillance technologies. We’ve come a long way from putting cameras on pigeons to landing them on Mars!
