On this date, June 2, in 1940, over 160,000 people gathered in Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium for Cardinal Dennis Joseph Dougherty’s Golden Jubilee Mass. The gathering, the city’s largest assembly of Catholics since the 1926 Solemn Pontifical Mass for the Sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, was documented in this aerial photograph by Dallin Aerial Surveys.
Dallin was a Royal Flying Corps-trained pilot who served in World War I; 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. The new company's clients included newspapers, businesses, municipalities, and private individuals, who contracted with Dallin 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 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 after Dallin rejoined the armed services for WWII. Today, the company’s photographic work (over 13,600 glass negatives and more than 23,000 photographic prints!) are kept at Hagley Library in our collection of Dallin Aerial Survey Company photographs (Accession 1970.200). Our Digital Archive also offers more than 7,800 images from the Dallin Aerial Survey Company collection. The majority of these photographs concentrate on the Mid-Atlantic region covering a period from 1924 to 1939. To view the digital collection online now, just click here. 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.