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Beautiful one of a kind Sandblasted Art
on Glass
Created by
Carol

and
Unique Photo CDs of Americas Civil War Battlefields,
Historic and National Landmarks, including Washington DC, Arlington National
Cemetery, and the Robert E Lee Memorial.
Our company, Antietam Digital Photo has completed
aerial photographic surveys of Gettysburg National Military Park,
Antietam National Battlefield,
Manassas National Battlefield, and
Monocacy
National Battlefield.
We share this resource with the National Park Service in that each park
receives a copy of every aerial photo for placement in their archives.
At the present time Gettysburg and Antietam's Battlefield Aerial Photo Cds
have been completed and are offered
for sale
on
this website in addition to our other fine Photo CD products.
To the best of our knowledge the Gettysburg and Antietam Aerial Photo Studies
are the only existing works of their kind and provide a unique view of these
Civil War Battlefield Parks and they also make wonderful gifts for students!
Military leaders have always realized the value of being able to observe an
enemies movements as an important part of warfare. Commanders have
relentlessly sought high points of land as observation posts from which they directed their
Armies.
As the world prepared to enter the19th century hot air balloons began to rise
off the ground in Europe, It is generally thought that the first use of a balloon as
a weapon of war took place in 1794 during the French Revolution at the
Battle
of Fleurus. The fledgling aeronauts
mapped enemy positions and relayed messages to the ground using hand signals
or written notes which were tossed out of the balloon to be picked up by
couriers. By the beginning of the American Civil War balloon technology
had replaced the temperamental hot air system with the more reliable and
durable Hydrogen Gas. In July of 1861 a young adventurer - inventor named
Thaddeus S. C. Lowe
demonstrated his Hydrogen Gas filled balloon for President
Abraham Lincoln on
the front lawn of the White House. Lowe filled his balloon with Hydrogen
and ascended to a height of 500 feet then he sent the following message to Lincoln,
To his Excellency,
Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States,
Dear Sir: From this point of observation we command an
extent of country nearly fifty miles in diameter. I have the pleasure of
sending you this first telegram ever dispatched from an aerial station, and
acknowledging indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity of
demonstrating the availability of the service of aeronautics in the service of
the country. I am, Your Excellency's obedient servant, T. S. C. Lowe.
The Key to Lowe's message lay in the word "telegraph" you see Lowe had strung
a telegraph wire from his tethered balloon down to the White House where
President Lincoln enthusiastically read the message. Lowe had
demonstrated with his balloon named
Enterprise a
spotter could provide instant intelligence as to the strength and whereabouts
of the enemy, Lincoln personally instructed
General Winfield Scott to form the
first United States Balloon Corps and had Thaddeus Lowe placed in charge of
it. Lowe served with the Corps until 1863 when a disagreement between
Lowe and the Army over costs caused him to resign his commission and the Balloon Corps was disbanded.
The United States Balloon Corps may have been short lived, but in just two
years its members made over 3000 ascensions during battles
that included Yorktown, Seven Pines, Antietam, and Fredericksburg.
Read more about the history of aerial
reconnaissance and aerial photography at the bottom of this page!
To see
more examples from our Civil War Battlefield Photos and our other great Photo
CDs of America including Washington DC, Arlington National Cemetery, and
Harpers Ferry, WV just click on the photos
below!
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A Brief History of Aerial Reconnaissance and Aerial Photography!
Early in the nineteenth
century work on various primitive photographic processes was gaining momentum
all over the world, but it was in France that photography was becoming a passion
and from the beginning early photographers
were fascinated with their world as seen from a bird's eye view. By 1829
photographers like
Joseph Nicephore Niepce
began attempting to capture images from the
windows and rooftops that overlooked their
surroundings.
The photographic process was painfully slow back then and the example of
Niepce's work seen here titled Image One took over eight hours of
exposure to create, which while revolutionary for its day would be considered a
poor quality photograph today by any standard. The
early processes used chemicals with exotic names like Bitumen of Judea, a
resinous substance, and Oil of Lavender to render their blurry images.
Photographers must have been considered the techno nerds of their day, being
part scientist and part magician these men who dabbled with chemicals and
strange apparatus were sure to have been considered eccentric by the general
public. In 1839 Niepce joined forces with a fellow scientist-photographer
named Louis M. Daguerre who had worked out a new photographic process that he
magnanimously named after himself calling it "Daguerrotype" which was later
nicknamed "tintype" by the photographers who used the
process. It utilized the combination of polished silver plate,
mercury vapors and sodium thiosulfate to create images in one tenth the time it
took Niepce to create his image, but it was still
painstakingly slow. The partnership between Niepce and Daguerre did not
last but it mattered very little in the long run since the process was quickly
made obsolete by other inventor's
work. By the middle of the nineteenth century the
helium filled gas balloon was being widely used and
theoretically it could provide the camera a perfect platform for creating images
of the ground below, but due to the balloon's constant movement and the long
exposure time required by the cameras it made capturing a sharp image extremely
difficult. However a French photographer named Gaspar Felix Tournachon
also known as "Nadar" is credited with creating the world's first true "aerial
photograph" in 1858 at Paris, France. Unfortunately none of these photographs
have survived for us to examine. Nadar continued with his work and in 1868
he created the amazingly detailed photo titled Image Two of the
Paris skyline
while suspended approximately eighty meters
above the ground in a balloon. In 1861 Civil War exploded in the United
States and provided a catalyst for the fledgling science of aerial
reconnaissance. As stated previously on this site Professor Thaddeus
Lowe's United States Balloon Corps would make over 3000 ascensions in support
of the Union Army before the secession of hostilities.
Unfortunately
it is histories loss that there are no examples known to
this author of any photographs being taken from these balloons during the Civil
War by either army. Part of this can be explained by
the fact that the balloons made very conspicuous targets for snipers and
artillery gunners alike, thus necessitating the need for speed in the gathering
of information about the enemy force you were observing. The next step forward in
the evolution of aerial reconnaissance and photography was made by another
Frenchman by the name of "Arthur Batut" with believe it or not a device even
more basic than the balloon, Batut used a large version of a child's toy kite!
Batut was able to take photos of landscapes using a camera which was suspended
from the kite and used a burning fuse system to trigger the shutter Image
3 is an example of a photo taken by Batut in 1889 at Labruguiere,
France. The practice of using kites to capture aerial images continued
well into the twentieth century. A photographer named George Lawrence used a
string of nine large kites to carry a camera that weighed approximately 49
pounds to height of 2000 feet and took photos of the San Francisco, California
skyline both before and after the great San Francisco fire of 1906.
Lawrence's photos were amazing and brought to light the importance of keeping a
chronological series of aerial photos to aid in the study of the impact made by
man and nature on the Earth's surface. Scientists today routinely utilize
thousands of images taken over prolonged periods of time covering the same area
in order to study an untold number of subjects. In many cases the early
photos taken by these pioneers are compared to modern images revealing important
changes that continue to affect our world. If you are interested in seeing
the work of George Lawrence the just follow this link to the
Library of Congress to view great examples of his work. The golden era
of aerial photos taken from kites officially ended just prior to World War II,
but the fate of kite photography was really sealed by the invention of and rapid
development of the airplane just after the turn of the twentieth century.
Coinciding with the birth of aviation came dramatic advances in the photographic
process from men like George Eastman who founded the "Kodak" company and in 1888
was granted a patent for film on a role which he would use in his immensely
popular "Brownie" camera that went on sale in 1900. In France Auguste
and Louis Lumiere advanced the dry plate process and the
introduced perforated film that led to a workable movie camera. In fact in 1909
Wilbur Wright produced aerial images from a movie camera while demonstrating his
Flyrer aircraft in Italy, quite simply the marriage of the airplane and the camera was
truly one made in heaven. Like so many other technical advances in history
war would play a significant role in the evolution of aerial photography.
In 1914
European alliances, and nationalistic jealousies finally spilled over into open
conflict and quickly escalated into a war of global proportions. The
nations of Europe quickly raised armies numbering in the millions and faced off
against one another on two fronts spanning great portions of the European and
African continents. With such a large area of combat it became more important than
ever to have good intelligence pertaining to your enemies strength and
disposition,
gone were the days when horse mounted cavalrymen were able to supply the information
needed by commanders in the field. The airplane was considered little more
than a toy at the beginning of the war but even the most stubborn
generals quickly recognized the value of observations made from aircraft and
soon both sides had observers flying over each others lines making notes and
sketches of what they saw below. Due to a lack in development of reliable
aerial cameras and mounting hardware photography was not widely
employed by the combatants during the early months of the war. All of that was
to change in 1915 when the first practical system for taking clear detailed
images of the ground from an aircraft was designed and implemented by the
British. By the
end of the war aerial photography had firmly established itself as a vital part
of military strategy and during peak times of fighting as many as 10,000 photos
were being taken and processed by the allies every day with great detail and
clarity as can be seen in Image Four. Following World War I the work
of two men who shared the last name of Goddard but who were not related would
advance the development of the science of aerial photography and literally take
it to new heights. In 1917 George W. Goddard enlisted in the aviation wing
of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and was selected to attend the first Officer's
School in Aerial Photography, U.S. School of Military Aeronautics at Cornell
University. Goddard was to become a driving force in the science of aerial
photographic and would play an invaluable role during World War II and attained the
rank of Brigadier General before retiring from the Air Force. In 1962
General Goddard's expertise was called on again when the Air Force was have
trouble in getting clear reconnaissance images of a sensitive target and asked
the retired Goddard for advice. Following his recommendation a pair of
obsolete strip cameras were taken out of storage and used for the photos.
The cameras worked flawlessly and twenty four hours later President John F.
Kennedy was shown the photos of Russian made missiles deployed in Cuba.
Based on these photos Kennedy demanded the Russians remove the threat and the
world held its collective breath as the two super powers approached the brink of
war. The other Goddard who contributed so much to aerial photography is
much better known to us since he is considered the father of modern rocketry and
NASA's Space Center in Greenbelt, Maryland bears his name. Dr. Robert
Goddard provided the ground work for modern rocketry and his work has been
studied by nearly every rocketeer that followed him including the Nazis in World
War II and the Russian rocket scientists that engineered Sputnik, the first manmade object to orbit the Earth in
1957. He was also the first man to launch a liquid propelled rocket in
1926 and in 1929 he equipped one of his rockets with a camera and captured the
first pictures to be taken from a rocket. He began his research at his
home in Auburn, Massachusetts but after being told by the local Fire Marshall
that he would have to discontinue his experiments he moved to a small town in
the southwestern United States that years later would capture the worlds
attention again concerning space. Dr. Goddard moved his laboratory and experiments to
Roswell, New Mexico! The history of aerial photography and aerial
reconnaissance while interesting to those of us who employ it has never really
captured the attention of the general public through the years, that is until
May 1, 1960 when a man named Francis Gary Powers and a planed called the U-2
made aerial espionage and its consequences a household word. Prior to 1956
Francis Gary Powers was a captain in the United States Air Force and served in
the Korean Conflict distinguishing himself as a capable single engine jet pilot.
These just happened to be the exact requirements that the CIA was looking for in
the pilots they were recruiting to fly an new high altitude plane born out of
the brain of aeronautical design genius Clarence "Kelly" Johnson Chief of Design
at the infamous Lockheed "Skunk Works." The U-2, nicknamed "The
Dragon Lady" was capable of reaching altitudes of more than 70,000 feet with a
range of 6,400 miles making it the perfect camera platform for seeing just what
the Russian military was up to. No interceptor fighter could reach that kind of
altitude and the Russians did not possess a missile capable of taking out a
target that elusive, or so the CIA thought. For four years they were right
the U-2 missions had gone of without a hitch but when things started to go wrong
they went very wrong. On May 1, 1960 Soviet fighters shadowed a U-2
piloted by Powers from a lower altitude as it penetrated deep into Soviet air
space on a secret photographic mission. As Powers aircraft glided over the
Russian countryside some 70,000 feet below he probably didn't even notice the
smoke trail made by a new surface to air missile designated the S-75 Dvina as it
streaked
toward his U-2. The missile impacted causing fatal damage to the aircraft
forcing Powers to bail out over the Soviet mainland, fortunately the U-2 was
equipped with a explosive device that could be triggered by the pilot to destroy
the aircraft thereby keeping it out of enemy hands, unfortunately Powers failed
to enable the device. The plane fell from 70,000 feet and from that height
one would think there would only be tiny pieces of the wreckage left after
impacting the ground or so again the CIA thought! Unknown the CIA the U-2
descended from those lofty heights and very nearly landed itself intact, as I
have previously stated when things started to go wrong they really went wrong.
Feeling the aircraft had been completely destroyed and the pilot killed in the
crash the CIA came up with the horribly lame cover story of it being a weather
plane that had strayed off course and the Eisenhower administration issued the
story to the press. Following this the previously quiet Russians were only
too happy to publish photos of not only the very much alive downed pilot, but
also his nearly unharmed spy plane complete with all the electronic and
photographic equipment used for espionage. The United States was caught in
the act of spying on the Russians, then lying about it in an obvious cover-up
with President Dwight D. Eisenhower being implicated as an accomplice to it, all
just months before the national election for president. Today what was
once viewed as spying has been to relegated to routine photo taking by the
advent of the earth orbiting satellites whose cameras are capable of taking high
resolution photos of every square inch of the Earth from 22,500 miles deep in
space. Even the popular search engine Google has an application called
Google Earth that can be downloaded for free and used to view any place on the
planet up close so the need for earth bound aerial reconnaissance and
photography is gone, right? Well, not quite. You see as useful as
those satellites are they can't see through clouds and smog, and services like
Google Earth quite often employ photographic images so old that they are no
longer relevant. No if anything the science of aerial photography inside
our atmosphere is even more important than ever. It is employed by fields
of endeavor ranging from scientific study, to police applications, and even the
managing the crops we grow. Oh and that old looking airplane the U-2
that Francis Gary Powers got shot down in way back in 1960 over the Soviet
Union, well it's not only still use by NASA, it's still flying spy missions for
the U.S. Military it's not scheduled for retirement until 2014! But then
that's only fair since it will be a venerable 68 years old by then!