This is the oldest surviving successful aerial photograph, shot in October 1860 by James Wallace Black from a hot-air balloon 1,200 feet over Boston.

He called it Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It.

06/22/2026 UPDATE: The photo was named not by Black but by Oliver Wendell Holmes!

In July 1863, Holmes wrote in the Atlantic Monthly (page 12): “Boston, as the eagle and wild goose see it, is a very different object from the same place as the solid citizen looks up at its eaves and chimneys. The Old South [Meeting House] and Trinity Church [left center and lower right] are two landmarks not to be mistaken. Washington Street [bottom] slants across the picture as a narrow cleft. Milk Street [left center] winds as if the old cowpath which gave it a name had been followed by the builders of its commercial palaces. Windows, chimneys, and skylights attract the eye in the central parts of the view, exquisitely defined, bewildering in numbers … As a first attempt [at aerial photography] it is on the whole a remarkable success; but its greatest interest is in showing what we may hope to see accomplished in the same direction.”

Only two years later the Union Army would use balloon photography to spy on Confederate troops during the Peninsular Campaign in Virginia.

(My thanks to reader Adam Mellion.)

A striking detail from Martha Tyson’s Sketch of the Life of Benjamin Banneker (1854):

Whilst they were conversing his clock struck the hour, and at their request he gave an interesting account of its construction. With his imperfect tools, and with no other model than a borrowed watch, it had cost him long and patient labor to perfect it, to make the variation necessary to cause it to strike the hours, and produce a concert of correct action between the hour, the minute, and the second machinery. He confessed that its regularity in pointing out the progress of time had amply rewarded all his pains in its construction.

This seems to be at least plausibly true: In 1753, the 21-year-old Banneker, who had never seen a clock, borrowed a watch from a trader, made drawings of its workings, and designed a wooden clock of his own. Peter N. Stearns writes in Time in World History (2020), “Banneker, the son of former slaves, borrowed a watch from an acquaintance, took it apart, ultimately using this as a model to build an impressively accurate clock entirely from carved wooden pieces, and then capitalized on the notoriety of this product to set up his own repair operation.” The clock continued to operate until Banneker’s death more than half a century later.

John Owen, one of the last veterans of the French and Indian War, lived to be 107 and posed for this photograph shortly before his death in 1843.

That makes him one of the earliest-born humans ever to be photographed. He was born in 1735.