Jump to content

Pigeon photography

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Malleus Fatuorum (talk | contribs) at 13:39, 16 July 2009 (military -> militaries). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Pigeon with German miniature camera, probably World War I

In the first half of the 20th century, the German apothecary Julius Neubronner experimented with pigeons in aerial photography. Pigeons were fitted with miniature breast-mounted cameras for aerial photography. The German experiments stopped after World War I due to lack of military interest in the technology, but were briefly taken up later by the German and French militaries, the CIA, and a Swiss clockmaker.

Origins

Four-year-old homing pigeon that has made 15 ascents in a balloon[1]

The first aerial photographs were taken in 1858 by the balloonist Nadar. Advances in photographic techniques made their use in unmanned aircraft feasible at the end of the 19th century. In the 1880s, Arthur Batut experimented with kite aerial photography. Many others followed him, and high-quality photographs of Boston taken with this method by Eddy in 1896 became famous. Amedee Denisse equipped a rocket with a camera and a parachute in 1888, and Alfred Nobel also used rocket photography in 1897.[1][2]

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.[3] a million in total.[1]

In an 1889 experiment of the Imperial Russian Technical Society at Saint Petersburg, the chief of the Russian balloon corps, Kowanko, took aerial photographs from a balloon and sent the developed collodion film negatives to the ground by pigeon post.[1]

Julius Neubronner

Julius Neubronner (1914)

Around 1903 Julius Neubronner (1852–1932), an apothecary in Kronberg near Frankfurt, was receiving prescriptions from a sanatorium in nearby Falkenstein via pigeon post, and delivered urgent medications up to 75 grams (2.6 oz) by the same method.[4][5] When one of the prescription-bearing 'poison eagles', as they were known in the sanatorium, lost its orientation in fog and arrived four weeks late, Neubronner was inspired with the playful idea of equipping his pigeons with automatic cameras to trace their paths. This led him to merge his two hobbies into a new 'double sport' combining carrier pigeon fancying with amateur photography.[6]

Neubronner began the development of a light miniature camera that could be fitted to a pigeon's breast by means of a harness and an aluminum cuirass.[7] The pigeons had to be trained carefully to make them used to their load.[4] To take an aerial photograph, Neubronner carried a pigeon to a location up to about 100 km (60 miles) from its home, where it was equipped with a camera and released. The bird, keen to be relieved of its burden, would typically fly home on a direct route, at a height of 50 to 100 meters (50 to 100 yards) and a speed not exceeding 15 kilometres per hour (10 miles per hour).[4][6] A pneumatic mechanism in the camera controlled the time delay before a photograph was taken.[7]

According to Neubronner, there were a dozen different models of his camera.[8] In 1907 he had sufficient success with a camera using 4 cm film[9] to apply for a patent. Initially his invention "Method of and Means for Taking Photographs of Landscapes from Above" was rejected by the German patent office as impossible, but after presentation of authenticated photographs it was granted in December 1908.[8] (The rejection was based on a misconception about the carrying capacity of domestic pigeons.[10]) In 1909 the technology became widely known through Neubronner's participation in the Internationale Photographische Ausstellung in Dresden[11] and the Internationale Luftschiffahrtausstellung in Frankfurt. Spectators in Dresden could watch the arrival of the pigeons, and the aerial photographs they brought back were turned into postcards.[7][12] Around the same time, his photographs were shown and awarded prizes at two Paris Air Shows.[8] His cameras, which weighed barely under 75 grams (2.6 oz), then had a size of roughly 8 cm by 4.5 cm and could take a series of 8 exposures.[4][13] A photograph of Schlosshotel Kronberg became famous due to its accidental inclusion of the photographer's wing tips. It was subject of a copyright dispute in the late 1920s.[7] (The Schlosshotel had been built for Neubronner's illustrious customer Kaiserin Friedrich, and was still known as Schloss Friedrichshof for some time after her death in 1901.)

Top: Schlosshotel Kronberg, bottom: Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Pigeons fitted with cameras

Around 1910, Neubronner developed the Doppel-Sport Panoramic Camera, which could capture a panoramic view on 3 cm × 8 cm film.[9] Like the other models it never went into serial production. The last model (before 1920) weighed slightly more than 40 grams (1.4 oz) and could take 12 exposures.[8]

In 1920, Neubronner found that ten years of hard work and considerable expenses had been rewarded only with his inclusion into encyclopedias[14] and the awareness that an ancillary technology, the mobile dovecote (described below), had proved its worth in the war.[8] Neubronner's Doppel-Sport camera is shown in the exhibition Photo + Film at Deutsches Museum in Munich.[15]

World War I

From the beginning, Neubronner's invention was at least partially motivated by the prospect of military applications. At the time, photographic aerial reconnaissance was possible but cumbersome, since it involved balloons, kites or rockets.[8] The Wright brothers' successful flight in 1903 opened new possibilities, to be improved during the First World War. However, pigeon-based photography with all its practical difficulties promised to deliver complementary, detailed photographs taken from a lower height.[8]

Neubronner's mobile dovecote and darkroom as shown at 1909 exhibitions

The Prussian War Ministry was interested, but there was some skepticism that could only be overcome through a series of successful demonstrations. The pigeons proved relatively indifferent to explosions, but an important difficulty under battle conditions was the fact that when a dovecote is moved, it takes relatively long to make the pigeons accept the new position.[8] The problem of making carrier pigeons accept a displaced dovecote with only a minimum of retraining had been tackled with some success by the Italian army around 1880;[16] the French artillery captain Reynaud solved it by raising the pigeons in an itinerant dovecote.[17] It is not clear whether Neubronner was aware of this work. However, he knew there must be a solution as he had heard of an itinerant fairground worker who was also a pigeon fancier with a dovecote in his trailer. Already at the 1909 exhibitions in Dresden and Frankfurt he presented a small carriage that combined a darkroom with a mobile dovecote in flashy colors. In months of laborious work he trained young pigeons to return to the dovecote even after it was displaced.[8]

In 1912, Neubronner completed his task (set in 1909) of photographing the waterworks at Tegel using only his mobile dovecote. Almost 10 years of negotiations were scheduled to end in August 1914 with a practical test at a maneuver in Strasbourg, followed by the state's acquisition of the invention. The plans were thwarted by the outbreak of the war. Neubronner had to provide all his pigeons and equipment to the military, which tested them in the battlefield, with satisfactory results.[8][18]

In the end, reconnaissance by pigeon did not get off the ground. Instead, under the novel conditions of attrition warfare, war pigeons in their traditional role as pigeon post saw a renaissance. Neubronner's mobile dovecote found its way to the Battle of Verdun, where it proved so advantageous that similar facilities were used on a larger scale in the Battle of the Somme.[8] After the war, the War Ministry wrote Neubronner that the use of pigeons in aerial photography had no military value and further experiments were not justified.[7]

The International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. has a tiny room dedicated to carrier pigeons and pigeon photography in World War I.[19]

World War II

File:Michel, appareil photographique pour pigeon-voyageur, mode d'emploi.jpg
Michel created an operating manual, but could not find a production partner before World War II broke out.[9]

Julius Neubronner died in 1932. In spite of the rejection given to him immediately after the First World War, it appears that in the 1930s the German army in Munich trained pigeons for photography, and that the German pigeon cameras could take 200 exposures.[20] But the Germans had lost their monopoly on the technique.[21] The French army announced film cameras for pigeons as well as a method for having the birds released behind enemy lines by trained dogs.[22] This could have been an effective combination of two species of military animals. However, although war pigeons and mobile dovecotes were used extensively in World War II, it is not clear to what extent, if any, they were employed for aerial photography.

Thanks to research conducted by Musée suisse de l'appareil photographique at Vevey, much more is known about the pigeon cameras created around the same time by the Swiss clockmaker Adrian Michel in Walde. He adapted Neubronner's Doppel-Sport camera to 16 mm film and improved it further. He devised a mechanism that controlled the initial delay and the delay between exposures, and transported the film, while staying within the weight limit of 75 g. Michel's camera was patented in 1937, but his plan to sell it to the Swiss Army failed as he could not find a manufacturer for serial production. No more than around 100 cameras of this type were constructed.[9] After the Second World War broke out, Michel patented a shell and harness for the transport of items such as film rolls by carrier pigeon. Curiously, his legacy also contains a photograph of a dog equipped with what appear to be five small pigeon baskets.[9]

The Musée suisse de l'appareil photographique at Vevey has around 1,000 photographs taken for test purposes during the development of Michel's camera.[9] In the catalog of the 2007 exhibition Des pigeons photographes? they are classified as test photos on the ground or from a window, human perspectives from the ground or from elevated points, aeroplane-based aerial photographs, aerial photographs of relatively high altitude that were probably taken by pigeons released from a plane, and only a small number of typical pigeon photographs.[9][23]

After World War II

The CIA Museum shows a CIA-developed battery-powered pigeon camera as part of its virtual tour, saying that details of its use are still classified.[24] News reports suggest that this particular camera was used in the 1970s,[25] that the pigeons were released from planes, and that it was a failure.[26]

In 1978 the Swiss magazine L'illustré printed an aerial photograph of a street in Basel, taken by a pigeon of Febo de Vries-Baumann equipped with a camera with a hydraulic mechanism.[9]

In the 1980s a small number of high-quality replica Doppel-Sport cameras were made by Rolf Oberländer.[9] One was acquired in 1999 by the Swiss Camera Museum in Vevey,[9] and others have been sold as originals.[27]

In 2002/2003 the performance artist and pigeon fancier Amos Latteier experimented with pigeon photography using APS and digital cameras and turned the results into 'PowerPointillist' lecture performances in Portland, Oregon.[28]

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Hildebrandt 1907.
  2. ^ Hannavy 2008.
  3. ^ Fribourg 1892.
  4. ^ a b c d Les Nouveautés Photographiques 1910.
  5. ^ Schobert 1996.
  6. ^ a b Feldhaus 1910.
  7. ^ a b c d e Brons 2006a.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Neubronner 1920.
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Musée suisse de l'appareil photographique 2007.
  10. ^ Gradenwitz 1908 harvnb error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFGradenwitz1908 (help).
  11. ^ Le Matin 1909.
  12. ^ Professional Aerial Photographers Association.
  13. ^ Revue Photographique de l'Ouest 1911.
  14. ^ The sub-entry in (Meyer 1912) translates as follows: "[Carrier pigeon photography.] Julius Neubronner, Cronberg, has trained carrier pigeons to carry tiny photo cameras into the air which then function automatically. On the Internationale Luftschiffahrtsausstellung in Frankfurt 1909 he presented cameras, photographic results, as well as the method of training the pigeons for this service, successfully took a challenge and thereby won a first price […]. His works, which attracted general interest, are published in the memorandum 'Denkschrift der Ersten Luftschiffahrtsausstellung'. Unfortunately the practical value of this method is strongly impaired by the fact that carrier pigeons rarely ascend to more than 100 m."
  15. ^ Deutsches Museum München 2007.
  16. ^ Revue militaire de l'étranger 1886.
  17. ^ Reynaud 1898.
  18. ^ "The pigeon spy and his work in war", Popular Science Monthly, 88 (1): 30–31., 1916
  19. ^ Lui 2006.
  20. ^ Popular Mechanics 1931, Popular Mechanics 1932, The Canberra Times 1932, Popular Mechanix 1936.
  21. ^ Lagneau 2008.
  22. ^ Lectures pour tous 1932.
  23. ^ Berger 2008.
  24. ^ CIA website 2007.
  25. ^ Bridis 2003.
  26. ^ Eisler 2008.
  27. ^ [1]
  28. ^ Latteier 2003, Bowie 2003, Gallivan 2003.

References

Monographs

Articles and book chapters

Patents

  • Verfahren und Vorrichtung zum Photographieren von Geländeabschnitten aus der Vogelperspektive {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-first= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-last= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1907-06-20.
    • Procédé et appareil pour prendre des vues photographiques de paysages de haut en bas, 1908-11-02 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-first= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-last= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1908-06-18.
    • Method of and Means for Taking Photographs of Landscapes from Above {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-first= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-last= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1908-06-19.
    • Vorrichtung zum Photographieren von Geländeabschnitten aus der Vogelperspektive {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-first= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor-last= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1908-12-31.
  • Photographieapparat mit schwenkbarem, mit selbsttätiger Auslösung versehenem Objektiv, insbesondere für Brieftauben, 1937-12-01 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1936-02-03.
    • Panoramakamera mit schwenkbarem Objektiv, insbesondere für Brieftauben, 1938-02-12 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1936-02-14.
    • Appareil photographique à déclenchement automatique, particulièrement pour pigeons-messagers, 1936-09-21 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1936-03-07.
    • Improvements in or relating to Panoramic-cameras {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1937-01-27.
    • Appareil photographique à déclenchement automatique, particulièrement pour pigeons-messagers {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1937-01-16.
  • Traggerät für Brieftauben, 1941-07-16 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1940-06-22.
  • Depeschenhülse für Brieftaube, 1941-07-16 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |country-code= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |description= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |inventor= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |issue-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |patent-number= ignored (help), filed 1940-06-22.

Further reading

  • Gradenwitz, Alfred (November 14, 1908), "Les pigeons photographes", L'illustration (3429): 322.
  • Neubronner, Julius (1909), Die Brieftaubenphotographie und ihre Bedeutung für die Kriegskunst, als Doppelsport, für die Wissenschaft und im Dienste der Presse. Nebst einem Anhang: 'Die Kritik des Auslandes' (in German).
  • Neubronner, Julius (1910), "Die Photographie mit Brieftauben", in Wachsmuth, Richard (ed.), Denkschrift der Ersten Internationalen Luftschiffahrts-Ausstellung (Ila) zu Frankfurt a.M. 1909 (in German).
  • Oelze, Friedrich Wilhelm (1910), Brieftaubensport und Brieftaubenphotographie (in German) {{citation}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help).
  • Sciences et Voyages, 2, 1919/1920 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |year= (help); Missing or empty |title= (help)CS1 maint: year (link).
  • "La pigeon-photographie", Cyclope – L'amateur d'appareils photographiques (in French), 11: 59, 1992.
  • Brons, Franziska (2006b), "Bilder im Fluge: Julius Neubronners Brieftaubenfotografie", Fotogeschichte (in German), 26 (100): 17–36.
  • Professional Aerial Photographers Association, "History of aerial photography", papainternational.org {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |retrieved= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help).
  • Latteier, Amos (2003), "A report on pigeon aerial photography", latteier.com.
  • Lui, Claire (2006), "Travel: The museum of spies", americanheritage.com.
  • Deutsches Museum München (2007), "New Exhibition: Photo + Film", deutsches-museum.de.
  • CIA website (2007), "CIA Museum virtual tour", cia.gov.
  • Lagneau, Laurent (2008), "Des pigeons dans la guerre", opex360.com.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pigeon_photography&oldid=302414240"