Stonehenge and Avebury: Sir Henry Wellcome, camera kites, and lichen

Postcards to friends of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site

Archaeology abounds with astonishing characters, and firmly in that bracket we find Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), the wealthy American-born pharmacist and philanthropist pictured above right (courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London). Better known perhaps for spending his huge personal fortune on medical research and collecting, Wellcome was also the pioneer of aerial photography using kites, deploying this method to stereoscopically record his excavation of a site in the Sudan in 1911.

It was five years earlier of course that Stonehenge was photographed from a military balloon by Lieutenant P. H. Sharpe, but Wellcome’s box kite method was rather more portable, if more difficult to control and dependent on wind. Wellcome had visited Stonehenge himself in 1890, collecting lichen (pictured above by Stewart Emmens, courtesy of the Science Museum), apparently exporting the sample from the site in a now lost matchbox.

B.E.

See The Things that Henry “picked up”:
http://sciencemuseumdiscovery.com/blogs/collections/category/medicine/page/12/
See also:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/History/WTX052928.htm
http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/

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This is part of a series of short “postcards” that anyone with something to share is welcome to submit, whether that is a digital snap and a “wish you were here” or something more involved. Please do join in by sending your postcards to theheritagejournal@gmail.com

For others in the series put postcards in the search box.