Skip to main content

The Photo Birdman

March 2023
1min read

While the Wright Brothers experimented at Kitty Hawk, a photographer named William Jennings believed he and his friends were making aviation history

THE FIRST BALLOON FLIGHT in America lifted off from Philadelphia in 1793, and the 100th anniversary of the event prompted a reawakening of interest locally. That year a group of Philadelphians banded together to build a series of balloons, the last and largest of which, christened Ben Franklin , began flights in 1907. By chance, the group acquired the services of an official photographer, William Jennings. Jennings was eager to shoot views of Philadelphia from the air, and he finally talked his way onto his first flight by offering to pay all costs. Once aloft, Jennings described himself as a “Photo Birdman, rushing through Cloudland.” His aerial views turned out well, but the photographs he took of the flights themselves are more wonderful still. In a scrapbook he titled “The Evolution of Aviation,” Jennings’s pictures document one man’s delight at learning to fly.

—J.C.

 
 
 
 
 

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "October/November 1984"

Authored by: Bruce Catton

The Great Lakes hurricane of 1913 was a destructive freak. As far as lakers were concerned, it was …

Authored by: Charles E. Rosenberg

American medicine in a crucial era was at once surprisingly similar and shockingly different from what we know today. You could get aspirin at the drugstore, and anesthesia during surgery. But you could also buy opium over the counter, and the surgery would be more likely to be performed in your kitchen than in a hospital.

Authored by: Oliver E. Allen

Americans have never been so healthy, thanks to advances in medical technology and research. Now we have to learn to deal with the staggering costs.

Authored by: William Bennett

How a favorite local charity of Boston’s Brahmins—parochial and elite—grew into one of our great democratic medical institutions

Authored by: Robert B. Brown

America has won more Nobel Prizes in medicine than any other nation: it’s easy when you have the money, the technology, and people from every other nation

Authored by: Bernard A. Weisberger

A disease that no one understood laid waste a major American city. Five thousand died in two months, and Memphis was never the same again.

Authored by: The Editors

How our wartime experience conquered a wide range of problems from hemorrhagic shock to yellow fever

Authored by: The Editors

Here is how political cartoonists have sized up the candidates over a tumultuous half-century.

Authored by: Carol Mcd. Wallace

Peter Marié, a bon vivant of the Gilded Age, asked hundreds of Society’s prettiest women to allow themselves to be painted for him alone

Authored by: The Editors

While the Wright Brothers experimented at Kitty Hawk, a photographer named William Jennings believed he and his friends were making aviation history

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.