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University of Michigan.
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Richard Light
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After studying at Culver Military Academy, he earned an undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1924 and a Doctor of Medicine from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1928. He was director of the surgical laboratory at the Yale School of Medicine from 1933 to 1935. While planning the trip, many parts of the world had not been photographed from above and the American Geographical Society encouraged photographic flights to build an archive of aerial views.
His idea was to fly over areas of South America and Africa that had never been captured on film from the air and Meader was happy to go along with lieutenant
Meader had to take flying lessons and learn Morse code in able to become her husband"s co-pilot, navigator, and radio operator. In an interview with Encore Magazine in 2006, when asked why she decided to take the journey, she replied: "lieutenant just seemed like a great adventure – something I wanted to do.
Why? I"m not certain, other than we both knew we would be doing something that hadn"t been done before."
The two Lights took off out of Kalamazoo in September 1937 in a Bellanca monoplane, whose cabin lacked heat and pressurization. To survive, they had to breathe oxygen from a tank with wooden mouthpieces.
Wearing a fur coat and a boot, Meader took photographs out of a window frame.
The Lights were banned from photographing Central America, Ecuador, and Colombia, to prevent the gathering of strategic knowledge. They, however, were allowed to take pictures over Peru, and took the earliest photographs of the Nazca lines. While unable to distinguish from the ground, from the air the designs range from simple patterns to hummingbirds and llamas.
After photographing South America, the couple crossed the Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa.
While there, she photograped the ice dome and crater of Mount Kilimanjaro and the glaciated pinnacles of Mount Kenya. In addition, her photographs include different views of native villages, urban areas, and the Egyptian pyramids, as well as several other subjects.
On an average day they would rise at 4 a.m. and fly until 11 a.m, afterwich they would visit the farms, mines, and native settlements that would be photographed the next day. The two returned to Kalamazoo in February 1938.
In all, Meader took over 1,000 photographs in her two flights.
After the flight, Light wrote the book Focus on Africa, which included his wife"s photos and published by the American Geographical Society. The book was only the second which included aerial photos. A 1941 review of the book by Mary Jobe Akeley of the New York Times called the pictures "superb".
In 1962, Light created an undergraduate scholarship awarded annually.
