Irvine C. Gardner

1958 President Irvine Clifton Gardner contributed much to progress in aerial photography in the nearly 40 years he spent at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), USA. When he joined NBS in 1921, US optics was still in its infancy. In 1950 when he became chief of the division of optics and metrology, the US optical industry was robust. When Gardner retired in 1959, the laser was just on the horizon.

Born in 1889, Gardner devoted his career to the field of optical instrument design and testing, but he was best known for his work in photography. In 1932, he published a paper in the NBS Journal of Research on the optical requirements of mapping from an airplane. His work in optics applied to aerial photography has assisted astronomers, solar scientists, and Arctic explorers in their quest to learn more about the earth and its surrounding atmosphere.

In 1936, Gardner headed a joint NBS-National Geographic Society expedition to what is now known as Khazakstan to observe the total eclipse of the sun. One of the team’s goals was to take the first natural color photographs of a solar eclipse. Using a 4-m eclipse camera with a 23-cm astrographic lens made in NIST's glass plant, the researchers got their images and new data on the sun's corona, prominences, and spectra.

A year later, Gardner joined Floyd Richtmyer, who was also an early pioneer of the Society, as part of the 1937 National Geographic-U.S. Navy expedition to the Canton Islands in the South Pacific to witness another solar eclipse.

In honor of Gardner’s many contributions to aerial photography, the Gardner Inlet in Antarctica and a Moon crater are named after him. He received Frederic Ives Medal in 1954 and was a Fellow of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology and OSA, and a member of the American Antarctic Association.

Gardner died in 1972.