HistoricAerials.com

We finally did it. The Historic Aerials app is here.

If you already have an account, you can log in and access your saved imagery and work right from your phone.

For years, people have asked for a way to explore historic aerial imagery on the go. Now you can.

One feature we love: tap a button and see your exact location on imagery from decades ago. Stand somewhere today and see what it looked like in 1958.

If Nadar could send one message forward from 1858, it might sound something like this.

(Yes, this is satire.)

But the history is not.

Our latest article examines his aerial experiments, the volatile collodion process, and the origins of aerial photography as a technical discipline.

Read it here: https://blog.historicaerials.com/nadar-birth-of-aerial-photography/

This is the oldest surviving aerial photograph ever taken.

Boston, 1860. Photographer James Wallace Black is in a hot-air balloon with Samuel Archer King, exposing fragile glass plates coated in wet collodion while the city drifts slowly beneath them.

The result, “Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It,” looks simple by today’s standards. But it only exists because photography had just learned how to move.

Nine years earlier, the wet plate collodion process changed the rules:
• shorter exposures instead of long, unforgiving minutes
• glass negatives that could be printed and shared
• a workflow that could survive wagons, fields… and balloon baskets

The invention of this process was the moment cameras became mobile enough to leave the ground and start showing us the world from above.

https://blog.historicaerials.com/how-wet-plate-collodion-opened-the-sky-for-photography/

Three days before Ohio State and Michigan line up, “The Game” looks like just another blue-chip showdown. But its roots run back to the 1830s, when bad maps, swampy ground, and a stubborn little port called Toledo pushed both states to mobilize militias and draw rival survey lines across the same strip of earth. Read more to learn why this fight has always been about more than football: https://blog.historicaerials.com/from-the-toledo-war-to-the-game-how-a-survey-error-fueled-the-michigan-ohio-rivalry/

It’s wild how much the landscape can change.

For more than 50 years, the GM Desert Proving Ground in Mesa, Arizona was one of the toughest automotive test sites in the world. Engineers pushed new vehicles to their limits—extreme heat, choking dust, and nonstop punishment designed to expose every weakness.

Today, the entire site has been transformed into a master-planned suburban community. If you didn’t know the history, you’d never guess what happened on this land.

See the evolution from above and explore more forgotten proving grounds here: https://buff.ly/JATtR5H