I’ve started rewatching Robert Hughes’ 1980 TV series ‘The Shock of the New’. In episode one he lauds the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, as the symbol of modernism, the ‘Tower of Babel of the new Machine Age’. He argues that it changed our conditions of seeing by making available to a mass audience a view of the land seen flat from above – in his opinion, a view as significant as the first ones of the earth from the moon eighty years later. He says that such views had only been seen previously by a few men in balloons.
In fact aerial photography had revealed the earth from above 30 years earlier. Nadar, Gaspard Felix Tournachon, patented the idea of using aerial photographs in mapmaking and surveying in 1855. He made the world’s first aerial photograph from a balloon in 1858. The oldest surviving photograph by Nadar was of the Arc de Triomphe in 1868. Two years after Nadar’s first success, James Wallace Black, and Professor Sam King, ascended to an altitude of 1200 feet (the Eiffel Tower is 984 feet) in King’s balloon and photographed portions of the city of Boston, USA.
