The Boston Camera
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
They have a massive range of the history of aviation with a good mixture of foreign birds as well as US aircraft. I'm personally a fan of those classic Douglas planes, they're so incredibly iconic and have quite a showing at the museum.
EDIT: I guess I should clarify the relation to this article. The actual prototype is housed at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, OH along with the C-97 that carried it on display. They have a small exhibit with some example photos of its technology. Its literally right next to the B2 on display.
* Actually it's the only XB-70 in existence.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie
The planes are fantastic but the highlight for us was talking to a former F-4 pilot about techniques for dodging SA-2s. Highly recommended.
Tacit Blue is also worth a look. It's honestly hard to imagine anything so ungainly actually taking to the air.
ETA: Dunno if they still have it on display, but for a long time they had just the forward fuselage of Bock's Car sitting unloved in a corner. It's hard to reconcile the destruction unleashed by that single plane with the utter impotence of a piece of it sitting helplessly in a museum.
As to the Bockscar, they have it on display with its payload bay open along with replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy under its wings.
All that being said, the highlight for us was seeing the WWII planes fly overhead and then seeing one of the VC-25As flying past seconds later. Multiple times. The rumor was they were doing takeoff/landing training.
I assume 70 years of tech has only resulted in surveillance that is cheaper, lighter, with longer loiter times, on a smaller plane, farther away, and a clearer, faster image.
And since politicians never listen to me, I feel helpless to vote it down.
"Low key" names like "Big Brother"... could they be more evil.
Honestly though, if they called it something like peacekeeper maybe that would have worked.
Post-WWII would have been a great time to be working in tech. "To photograph people's faces from high altitude, we'll need a lens with a 240 inch focal length." "But our airplanes are only 140 inches diameter". "We'll use mirrors."
Makes my hair stand up thinking about working on a project such as the Boston Camera. People like Feynman walked around alive and computers were being invented.
Hey Silicon Valley, why are we working on ads? (myself included). I wanna do something else.
On the other hand, this could mostly be selection bias on which stories get passed down. I haven't looked into it rigorously, it's just a feeling I sometimes get when I see the cookie cutter study design/grant writing process going on.
Still mountains of stuff being invented now. Almost the entire history of smartphones comes from the last 10 years.
If you think this camera in the OP is cool, you should also be impressed that we are putting periscopes and mirrors inside phones to create adjustable zoom that fits in your pocket and costs hardly anything.
Another commenter made a valid point that there is a lot else going on, if you're not blinded by high comp. I guess that's true for both investors and employees.
There's a lot out there that doesn't work with the current VC model. Some of it is that there are great potential businesses that aren't going to be billion dollar exits. I think a lot of these are more interesting or worthwhile things to work on. There are VCs that will invest in those, but I think the amount of equity they take is too high.
Then there are a bunch of great things to work on that require lots of capex. These are also worthwhile and interesting. Other countries are making those investments, and we're going to be in a bad place by not doing the same.
This was a camera with lenses designed in 1947. Is the current tech state of the art available? My understanding is that the close up aerial imagery on Google Maps is patched together from much lower flying aerial photos. But these CIA cameras from the 40s sound superior to what we have on Google Maps today (seeing people in central park from 72 miles away, for example).
Also, it's a film camera, and sounds like it had problems with image smearing in actual use in flight. My guess is that it's a very very good lens (which mainly comes down to elbow grease) paired with tech that's otherwise completely obsolete today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-245
---- Edit:
Wikipedia has an image from one of the above
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-224#/media/File:2019-08-29...
Estimated resolution is 10cm or better (the 10cm/pixel image is a photo of a printout, not the original). Distance is estimated to be 382km.
http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/edgerton/EdgertonInWor...
Maximum resolution: 28 lines/mm
Film size: 18-by-36-inch (46 cm × 91 cm)
It was Zeiss factories in Jena that were captured. Leitz is located in Wetzlar.