Past, Present, and Future | Historical Aerial Photography
Description
University of Maine Sewall Company https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/sewell_aerial/
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Title: Past, Present, and Future | Historical Aerial Photography
Transcript : Balloons, pigeons, and kites. All three of these objects have served as vehicles for aerial photography. In 1860– floating high above the city of Boston in a hot air balloon– James Wallace Black took one of the first successful aerial photographs. He titled it “Boston as the eagle and the wild goose see it.” Taken only a year before the start of the Civil War photographs like Black’s would become a staple for military reconnaissance.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Lt. Hugh D. Wise had built an eighteen foot high kite with a box camera attached to it and the German inventor Dr. Julius Neubronner strapped cameras to the chests of pigeons, turning them into avian paparazzo and releasing them throughout the country.
{Pigeon flutter}
After the Wright brothers first successful flight in nineteen- oh three cameras started to make their way into airplanes, becoming tools for information in World War One and World War Two.
{Music}
But military intel wasn’t the only use for this burgeoning field. Scientists started using aerial photographs to understand difficult to reach geological formations like glaciers and volcanic craters. Archeologists began to see ancient works– like the Ancestral Pueblo ruins of the southwest– from a different point of view. And the damage from natural disasters like earthquakes and floods became easier to assess.
Sea to Trees is brought to you by Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park. I’m Trevor Grandin. In this episode we’ll delve into the past to understand how a collection of aerial photographs once stored in a library annex are being unearthed and how they could help tell the story of modern Maine.
{Pause}
Peter Howe’s face is positioned inches away from a brightly lit table on the third floor of the University of Maine’s Fogler Library. Behind a locked door in the special collections section, two negative aerial photographs of the Schoodic Peninsula are side by side and backlit.
{HOWE}: “This... this one here… what’s the date we have on this one? This is nineteen-fifty-five... so one-hundred-and-twenty-five... this was one of the largest surveys we have on record... the eastern corporation. This survey… so there were nine rolls of film... oh here we go… (fade)”
The black and white photos capture a birds-eye view of the peninsula, allowing us to study the layout of Acadia on August twenty-fifth, nineteen-fifty five. Like Peter said, these photos are part of film roll number one-hundred-and-twenty-five, a series of aerial shots of Downeast Maine produced for the Eastern Corporation, a paper manufacturing company that once controlled large swaths of spruce forest throughout Maine.
Roll one-hundred-and-twenty-five is a tiny part of a much larger collection held within UMaine’s Special Collections. This treasure trove of aerial photography consists of almost three-thousand canisters of film.
The photographs were donated by the very organization that took them, the James W. Sewall Company. Sewall’s primary directive was forestry and civil engineering. This manifested as mill operation inspections, timber appraisals, fire protection, and large scale land surveys. An early promotional pamphlet lays out their purpose to prospective clients.
{Wood chopping and trees falling} {Music}
{Character voice over}: “Thanks to modern forestry knowledge and methods... the possible increase in the value of forest and timber lands can now be estimated with remarkable accuracy… You already know that all wooded lands are steadily increasing in value; we want you to realize that practically all these wooded lands can be appreciably enhanced in value under careful management... and that it is our business... as practical foresters... to achieve the best possible results along these lines for our patrons.”
As technology advanced, Sewall’s operations grew wings and the survey process took an aerial approach, beginning in 1946.
{Propeller plane taking off and circling}
For almost seventy years, organizations like the Eastern Corporation, Maine Department of Transportation, and even the National Park Service hired Sewall to fly over land in their jurisdiction and take survey photos. Equipped with a pilot and a camera operator, the small propeller planes buzzed along the landscape. A camera, like an overhead projector without an arm, poked out of a fitted hole in the plane's body and pointed at the ground.
{Camera shutters}
The camera operator sitting next to the machine – shutter button in hand – snapped photos at specific moments in the air, producing a quilt of images waiting to be stitched together later. The collection includes surveys from Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and even Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Many organizations wanted to understand what types of vegetation were present and in what abundance. Some flights took place during specific seasonal or weather events like leaf offs or strong ice storms. Eight years after a fire burned over seventeen thousand acres of land on Mount Desert Island, a survey crew documented the newly grown forests of birch and aspen trees that took hold after the blaze.
All taken at different points in time spanning from nineteen-forty-six to twenty-fifteen, these photographs illustrate how a landscape can change, both naturally and through human intervention. That’s where Peter Howe comes in.
Peter is a PhD student in the University of Maine’s School of Forest Resources and an Acadia Science Fellow. He’s using this collection of photographs for his own research while trying to make it accessible for the public. Working with library specialist Paul Smitherman, Peter is taking a multistep approach to his research.
{Howe}: “Ya know… my little piece of this project has many parts. Like definitely the big collaborative first step that I’m working with Paul on is we just need to get a lot of this digitized because just a small fraction of the archive has been digitized at this point… and then getting them stitched together into these georeferenced mosaics that we can compare to the modern landscape and modern imagery. Then from there, looking closer at the forest and trying to understand forest change across time which is where I’m hoping to do more GIS analysis.”
And that first step – the digitization – may be Peter’s largest step.
{keys jingling and unlocking}
Because behind the locked doors of the special collections storage lies a small fraction of his work.
{HOWE}: “This is what… one percent of everything… fades.”
This one percent of the film collection takes the form of two floor to ceiling, long metal shelves filled top to bottom with jet black canisters. Each canister is about the height of a roll of paper towels and weighs over fifteen pounds. A bright yellow Kodak sticker swiped across the front of the canisters identifies them as infrared aerographic safety film.
The tops of the canisters are labeled with their respective numbers, the organization that commissioned them, the date they were taken, and their scale. The other ninety nine percent of the film is stored in a University of Maine annex across campus sitting snugly on rolling library stacks.
{rolling shelves}
{HOWE}: “Somewhere up there is the number five canister… probably on that top shelf. That’s nineteen - forty nine. It would be some of the earliest.”
Prior to Peter’s research, Smitherman was manually scanning in film as it was requested. If someone asked for photos, for example of Hancock county, he would scan a couple and send them on their way. Using this manual scanning process it takes about ten minutes to upload one roll. With over three thousand canisters in the collection it would take over twenty days of continuous, around-the-clock scanning to digitize every roll. Thanks to funding from the Northeastern State Research Cooperative and Acadia Science Fellowship the project now has access to an automatic scanner.
In its idle form the UltraScan 5000 looks like a powder-blue pancake griddle. Taking up the entire table top, the heavy rectangular machine’s lid has two black, plastic coverings on either side. Lifting the lid illuminates what’s hiding under those exterior coverings. Two black batons – like plastic rolling pins – hold the film rolls and gently rotate, spooling and unspooling the negatives over the glass scanning table in the middle. Load the roll up, let the spokes rotate and they scan the photos automatically.
Although the scanner is an obvious upgrade, it comes with its own set of quirks. Made in nineteen-ninety nine, the model was discontinued in the early two thousands. Consequently, there is no technical support that goes along with the scanner and no updates for its software. Without updates the scanner can only run on Windows XP, an operating system that works on a choice number of older computers.
{HOWE}: “So we had to find a dated computer that wasn’t too fast but wasn’t too slow and then using this software that hasn’t been updated because they stopped making it back in two thousand.”
Scanning a whole roll of film manually wouldn’t be such a big hassle if they only had a couple photos inside but each roll of film comes with around two h
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