On October 13, 1860, Boston photographer James Wallace Black ascended above the city in Queen of the Air, a balloon operated by noted aeronaut Samuel Archer King. Tethered over Boston Common at an altitude of about 1,200 feet, Black made eight exposures using the wet-collodion photographic process—a demanding technique that required preparing, exposing, and developing glass-plate negatives before the coating dried. Only one exposure succeeded, producing a clear view eastward over Boston toward the harbor.
Black originally described the result as a “Balloon View of Boston,” but the poet, physician, and Harvard professor Oliver Wendell Holmes later gave it its enduring title: Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It. The surviving image is an albumen silver print made from a glass negative and measures roughly 18.5 by 16.7 centimeters.
The photograph was a landmark because it demonstrated that photography could capture the city from a perspective previously available only to birds and balloonists. French photographer Nadar had experimented with aerial photography over Paris in 1858, but those images no longer survive; Black’s Boston view therefore became the earliest aerial photograph still in existence.
Its importance extended beyond novelty. Aerial views offered a new way to record urban form, streets, buildings, harbors, and changing landscapes—capabilities that later became central to cartography, urban planning, land-use surveying, and military reconnaissance. Aerial photography matured especially during World War I, when cameras aboard aircraft were used to map enemy positions and defenses.
The image also preserves a vanished Boston: much of the area visible in Black’s photograph was destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Today, Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It is recognized not only as a technical milestone but also as a rare visual record of the pre-fire city.
