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BALLOON PHOTOGRAPHY 
The first known photographs were introduced in 1839 by Daguerre. 
Soon after that date, the science of photogrammetry was developed, al 
though it was not known by that name. The very first reference to the 
application of photography in making topographic maps was about 1840, 
when Dominique Francois Jean Arago, the French geodesist, referred to 
the Daguerretype process of Daguerre and Niepce before members of the 
Chamber of Deputies in Paris, and advocated the use of photography by 
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topographers. 
In 1849, Col. Aime Laussedat, an officer in the French Corps of 
Engineers, embarked upon a determined effort to prove that photography 
could be used to advantage in the preparation of topographic maps. His 
exhaustive researches and experiments, carried on over a long period of 
years, have caused some modern writers to refer to him as the "Father 
of Photogrammetry". 
In 1858, he experimented with a glass plate camera in the air, first 
supported by a string of kites, and later by a captive balloon. In 1859, 
he constructed a surveying camera with known data, and plotted certain 
parts of Paris by a method called "Metrophotogrammetric", which, to a 
certain extent, could be compared to the intersection on the plane table. 
His attempts at aerial photography had to be abandoned in 1860, because 
of the difficulty in taking a sufficient number of photographs from one 
air station to cover all the area that the outlook commanded. Laussedat ! s 
ideas for compiling topographic maps from photographs were at first held 
in ridicule by most of his contemporaries. He continued with his work, 
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however, and finally succeeded in developing a mathematical analysis for