Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German apothecary Julius Neubronner. A homing pigeon was fitted with an aluminium breast harness to which a lightweight time-delayed miniature camera could be attached. The technology has since been adopted by many countries, including the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, and even the UK and the Netherlands.
About Pigeon photography in brief
Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German apothecary Julius Neubronner. A homing pigeon was fitted with an aluminium breast harness to which a lightweight time-delayed miniature camera could be attached. Initially, the military potential of pigeon photography for aerial reconnaissance appeared interesting. Battlefield tests in World War I provided encouraging results, but the ancillary technology of mobile dovecotes for messenger pigeons had the greatest impact. In 2004, the British Broadcasting Corporation used miniature television cameras attached to falcons and goshawks to obtain live footage, and today some researchers, enthusiasts and artists similarly deploy crittercams with various species of animals. The first aerial photographs were taken in 1858 by the balloonist Nadar; in 1860 James Wallace Black took the oldest surviving aerial photographs, also from a balloon. Homing pigeons were used extensively in the 19th and early 20th century, both for civil pigeon post and as war pigeons. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the famous pigeon post of Paris carried up to 50,000 microfilmed telegrams per pigeon flight from Tours into the besieged capital. In an 1889 experiment of the Imperial Russian Technical Society at Saint Petersburg, the chief of the Russian balloon corps took aerial photographs from a balloons and sent the developed collodion film negatives to the ground by pigeon post. The United States Central Intelligence Agency later developed a battery-powered camera designed for espionage pigeon photography; details of its use remain classified.
The idea was briefly resurrected in the 1930s by a Swiss clockmaker, and reportedly also by German and French militaries. Although war pigeon were deployed extensively during World War II, it is unclear to what extent, if any, birds were involved in aerial reconnaissance. It is also unclear whether pigeons took part in aerial photography during the Second World War, or if they were simply used to carry messages and other cargo on their way home to their homes. The technology has since been adopted by many countries, including the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, and even the UK and the Netherlands. It has also been used by the U.S. Air Force, the Australian Air Force and the Australian Department of Defence to take aerial photographs of military targets and to track the progress of troops on the battlefield. The technique was first used in the early 1900s, but was not widely adopted until the 1950s and 1960s. The German patent application was granted in December 1908 after he produced authenticated photographs taken by his pigeons and sold some images as postcards at the Frankfurt International Aviation Exhibition and at the 1910 and 1911 Paris Air Shows. To accommodate the burdened pigeon, a pneumatic system in the system in Frankfurt was used to do the photographing. In 1907 he had sufficient success to apply for a patent for a camera that could be fitted to a pigeon, at a height of 50 metres.
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This page is based on the article Pigeon photography published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
