Historical Aerial Photographs

Rowe Collection Aerial Photographs Archive - Click Here

All of the photographs in this Rowe Collection were produced by Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc., or its subsidiaries and contractors during the period of 1927-1965, and are mostly black-and-white, vertical images.

Sherman Fairchild was born in 1896 in Oneonta , New York . His father was Republican Congressman George Winthrop Fairchild, one of the founders of International Business Machines (IBM), and the company's first president. Sherman began attending Harvard University in 1915, but soon transferred to the University of Arizona because his doctors thought the climate might help his bouts with tuberculosis. He also attended Columbia University , yet never received degrees from any of these universities.

In 1917, during World War I, Sherman Fairchild attempted to join the military but was rejected because of his poor health. Determined to aid in the war effort, he and his father traveled to Washington to find out if the U.S. Army could benefit from Sherman 's camera expertise. The government contracted him to develop a camera for aerial photography; such cameras already existed, but produced highly distorted photographs due to slow shutter speeds which could not keep up with the movement of the flying plane. Fairchild developed a camera in which the shutter was placed inside the lens; this design was fast enough to produce photographs with minimal distortion. The project ended up costing $40,000, though the budget was only $7,000; the wealthy senior Fairchild paid the difference.

Unfortunately, the Army did not accept the camera until the war was over, but Fairchild convinced them to buy two cameras for training purposes. He quit classes at Columbia University to direct his time and effort towards improving his camera design and starting up Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation in February, 1920. Soon the Army ordered twenty more and made them their standard aerial cameras. Canada , Japan , Argentina , Brazil and the Soviet Union all purchased cameras from Fairchild's new company.

Fairchild had a more difficult time convincing surveying companies that aerial photography would be beneficial to them. No one had ever used aerial photographic maps prior to the development of Fairchild's cameras. Eventually aerial surveying caught on and Fairchild started a second company, Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc. Sherman Fairchild eventually went on to design aircraft (among a multitude of other things) and to open several more companies, such as Fairchild Recording Equipment Corporation and Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.

Meanwhile, Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc. opened other offices, including one at 224 E. Eleventh Street in Los Angeles . The company remained in business until 1965 when Fairchild sold it to Aero Services, Inc. William Rowe often used their services to collect information for his engineering efforts. Thus, the WRI has a collection of his images for this reason. http://web.whittier.edu/fairchild/home.html