A Brief History of Pre-Drone Vintage Aerial Photography

One of the gadgets pitched at this year's CES that I'm actually pretty psyched on is the Pocket Drone. The "personal flying robot" is pint-sized but strong enough to carry a GoPro camera for 20 minutes. Who doesn't want one of those?

At around $500 the microcopter is also relatively affordable—for a drone—and comes ready to fly. So the company, AirDroid, believes it could will be the commercial drone to finally break into the mainstream and "democratize the sky." It's off to a good start at least; the Kickstarter raised over $50,000 in one day, way past its goal.

But whether or not it's the Pocket Drone that leads the charge, flying cameras are on their way to the consumer market. Which means get ready for the era of ubiquitous aerial imagery. To borrow a pun from the company, "personal and professional photography is literally beginning to take off."

Drones have already revolutionized aerial imagery and footage, albeit largely inaccessible to everyday folk. But before we had surveillance-ready unmanned vehicles, sky photography was considerably more complicated. To feed the fascination with the view of the world from above, people went to great lengths to defy gravity, enlisting the help of ladders, tall buildings, pigeons, balloons, planes, and rockets. Here's a snapshot of how aerial imagery's evolved throughout history.

The first surviving aerial photograph is a picture of Boston taken in 1860 from a hot air balloon, from about 690 yards up.

About 20 years later, a few enterprising photographers started taking pictures with cameras affixed to kites—the first unmanned flight. This usually involved stringing several powerful kites together to elevate the heavy equipment.

In 1903 a European photographer designed cameras that could be mounted on carrier pigeons. They took automatic exposures as the bird flew through the sky. The Bavarian Pigeon Corps gathered useful intel for soldiers, when they weren't shot down and eaten by the troops.

Like many technologies, aerial imagery got a boost during wartime. World War I was one of the first major military conflicts to piece together the inventions of aircraft and photography. Instead of soldiers sketching maps from the air, spy planes carried reconnaissance cameras. Over the course of the war the quality of the cameras increased and they became easier for pilots to use in flight.

By World War Il, militaries were using smaller, faster planes for surveillance, and in tandem, camera technology improved so photos could be taken at faster speeds and higher altitudes for better intelligence gathering. Allied troops depended heavily on aerial images to plan the invasion of Normandy on D-Day.

When we grew tired of the view from the stratosphere, we went higher. The first photos from space were taken on sub-orbital rocket flights in the mid-1940s. They were snapped from 65 miles up—five times higher than ever before.

By 1963, US astronauts sent the first view of the Earth from the moon back to a public gaping at their TV sets.

Satellite imagery resolution increased until today, a camera in orbit can snap a shot of an individual person on the Earth's surface. The next trend? Real-time satellite footage. A handful of startups are starting to send microsatellites into space that send back high-res images and video of the globe for anyone with an internet connection to peep.

We've come a long way from hot air balloon darkrooms and camera-fitted pigeons. Now to photograph a view of the world from the sky, it's no longer necessary to even get off the living room couch.

@meghanneal