From Paper to Digital: The Cartographic Revolution

Aerial photography, first used systematically for mapping purposes during the First World War (1914–1918) as reconnaissance aircraft photographed enemy trench lines and troop positions, gave rise to the discipline of photogrammetry, the science of extracting precise measurements from photographs. By the interwar decades, photogrammetric techniques using overlapping stereoscopic pairs of aerial photographs allowed surveyors to reconstruct terrain elevation and to produce large-scale topographic maps far faster than ground-based triangulation alone could achieve, transforming national mapping programs worldwide.