A Brief History of Remote Sensing
Remote sensing has been with us for longer than you may think. In the 1600s, Galileo used optical enhancements to survey celestial bodies. (He also used his optical equipment to observe merchant ships arriving in harbor, capitalizing on this information to modify his investment strategies to anticipate changes in the rapidly fluctuating prices of the local commodity markets.) French balloonist and photographer Gaspard Felix Tournachon attempted (without great success) to perform land surveys in 1859 using photos taken from tethered balloons. Similar technologies were used for the next four years by the Union forces in the USA civil war, also with unsatisfactory results.
In the 1880s, Arthur Batut in Labruguiere, France affixed cameras to kites. His apparatus included an altimeter which encoded the altitude onto the film so the scale of his images could be determined. The camera shutter was triggered by a slow burning fuse, and his mechanism released a red flag when the shutter had been tripped. For all this, Batut is considered the father of kite aerial photography, a technique that persists in modern times. At least one modern preserve manager has a hobbyist interest in attaching cameras to kites for remote sensing applications, but this is still in a novelty stage of development (S. Eisenhauer, private communication, 2000).