The History of Aerial Photography

From the good people at Mental Floss.

Although DaVinci wrote about the physics behind photography, the chemicals were not properly developed til a few hundred years later. The first real photograph was taken around 1826. The first aerial photograph was taken in 1858 by Felix Tournachon, known as Nadar, from a tethered balloon over the Bievre Valley in France. Those photographs no longer exist. The oldest surviving aerial photograph is this one of Boston, taken by James Wallace Black in 1860, using a tethered balloon