The Dallin Aerial Surveys
The Dallin Aerial Survey Company was based at the small Philadelphia Municipal Airport, near where the International Airport stands today.
From 1924 to 1941, Dallin Aerial Survey Company took thousands of aerial photographs throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. Using open airplanes and specially-designed aerial cameras with 8x10 inch glass plate negatives, the clarity of these images is an absolute marvel. These photos are a valuable resource for historians and genealogists today.
Most of the aerial images were taken from between 400 and 1,500 feet altitude, with the camera mounted on the side of the fuselage, facing forward, at an angle of about 45-degrees.
J. Victor Dallin was a former member of the Royal Air Force and veteran of the First World War.
Dallin Aerial Survey Of Sunbury RR Shops in the 1936 Flood
A crop from the above photo - showing the incredible details available from these photos.
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1897-1991
"In 1924, Colonel J. (John) Victor Dallin (1897-1991)founded the Dallin Aerial Surveys Company. Dallin was a Royal Flying Corps-trained pilot who served in World War One; in the latter stages of the war, he was sent on aerial photography service for reconnaissance missions.
After the war, in 1919, he put that experience to use when joined Bishop and Barker, a firm which did some aerial survey work. In the 1920s, he worked at the Philadelphia Aero Service Corporation, which operated a flying school in South Philadelphia. In 1924, he left to establish his own company and started Dallin Aerial Surveys as a single proprietorship.
Dallin Aerial Surveys produced photographs like this image of Center City Philadelphia, featuring City Hall, which was taken at 5:40 A.M. on June 24, 1934. Its clients included newspapers, businesses, municipalities, and private individuals, who contracted with the company for aerial images of factories, private estates, schools, country clubs, towns, airports, rivers, and newsworthy sites and events.
During its years of operation, the company produced not only oblique photographs of various sites for commercial purposes, but did a considerable amount of aerial photogrammerty (aerial mapping of a city, specifically the city of Philadelphia). In order to carry out his work, Dallin designed several specialized cameras and mounters. A camera used for film negatives in the 1930s had a thirty inch lens so that high vertical views could be made without flying excessively low over urban areas.
The Dallin Aerial Surveys Company closed in 1941, reportedly because he rejoined the armed services for WWII. Today, the company's photographs live at Hagley Library in our collection of Dallin Aerial Survey Company photographs (Accession 1970.200). Our Digital Archive also more than 7,800 images from the Dallin Aerial Survey Company collection. The majority of the photographs concentrate on the Mid-Atlantic region covering a period from 1924 to 1939.
To learn more about the Dallin Company and the collection, visit our online exhibit A Bird's Eye View of the Delaware Valley: The Photography of the Dallin Aerial Survey Company"
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