“Pigeons take photographs as they fly.” They were the first “drones”, in 1908

German pharmacist Julius Neubronner became famous at the beginning of the last century thanks to his invention. Here are the photographs that spies in the skies took before they were overshadowed by new technologies.

Long before drone photography became as commonplace as it is today, a German pharmacist had an idea that seemed crazy at the beginning of the last century: turning carrier pigeons into photographers.

By attaching small chambers to the birds’ bodies, Julius Neubronner managed to obtain some of the first images recorded from a true “bird’s POV”.

The story begins with an unusual family tradition. Neubronner’s father, also a pharmacist, already used pigeons to receive prescriptions and send urgent medications. Julius maintained this practice to replenish drug stocks. But one episode awakened his scientific curiosity: one of the pigeons disappeared for a month and returned without explanation.

Instead of accepting the mystery as inevitable, Neubronner decided to find out where the bird had been. He concluded that the best way was to force her to “tell” everything, with images.

Hence the project of an automatic camera, small and light enough to be transported in flight, was born. It was necessary to create a mechanism that would fire without human intervention and that would resist constant movement.

Neubronner tested shutter speeds when photographing from express trains, to calibrate the equipment so that it would capture sharp images on the move, reports an article published in December 1908 in .

The result was a set of devices in different versions. In 1907, Neubronner presented the method entitled “Method of and Means for Taking Photographs of Landscapes From Above” to the Imperial Patent Office. The description included a camera with two tilted lenses and automatic shutter, fixed to an aluminum frame and attached to the pigeon via a leather strap. The patent was approved in 1908, after the inventor presented photographic evidence (see below) that the system worked.

Neubronner exhibited the images at the Dresden International Photography Exhibition in 1909. The news spread quickly through the international press. In the US, The Colombian featured “Pigeons are used as photographers”; in Australia, the Lismore Star “Pigeons take photographs as they fly”.

The attention given to innovation did not go unnoticed by the watchful eyes of the Prussian Ministry of War, immediately attracted by the possibility of using pigeons with cameras for terrain reconnaissance, at a time when aerial observation and the technology associated with it was almost non-existent. A pigeon could fly at an altitude of around 45 to 90 meters, well above the range of small ammunition shots, and was “highly difficult to hit”, reinforced the report at the time.

Neubronner even organized test missions by training the birds to return to a mobile loft equipped with a darkroom, which would allow photographs to be quickly developed. But the plan “burned out”.

With the beginning of the First World War, specialized aerial cameras appeared, installed on planes, and quickly “kicked” the photo pigeons into the corner.

The pharmacist’s curiosity and capacity for technical imagination will go down in history, as he was much more than that: in addition to being a pioneer of amateur photography, Neubronner He was one of Germany’s first amateur filmmakers, was an apothecary at Empress Friedrich’s court and founded an adhesive tape factory.

A book by the publisher Rorhof, recovered the German’s archive in 2018, and released a selection of unpublished photographs of his pigeons that are worth taking a look at.