The U-2 camera, the "Type B," was truly revolutionary -- providing clear photographs of objects as small as a basketball from over 13 miles high. The scientific team behind the development of the U-2 camera were Polaroid founder and physicist Edwin Land and Harvard University professor James Baker, a renowned astronomer and lens designer. Land tackled the camera design while Baker perfected a new telescopic lens.

Above all else, the camera had to be compact and sophisticated. The camera design had to be light-weight, taking advantage of the latest advancements in photographic and film technology. The Type B camera incorporated new lightweight reflective optics, using mirrors to preserve the long focal lengths--the distance between the film and the optical center of the lens--while keeping the size manageable for the light-weight plane.

Baker, the first to use computers to aid in the design of lenses for aerial photography, worked out the lens dimensions for the Type B on an IBM computer. He then turned the lens fabrication work over to Perkin-Elmer, a company he had worked with on a panoramic camera since the end of World War II. During WWII, the best aerial photography lenses were capable of clearly resolving about 25 lines per millimeter. Baker's lenses developed for the U-2 spy missions were capable of resolving 75 lines per millimeter. Baker, who insisted the final grinding and examination of the lens take place in his Harvard lab, personally fitted the lens in each Type B camera. Once the lens and body design were perfected, a production contract for 25 cameras went to Hycon Corporation.

Loaded with film, the Type B weighed a hefty 500 pounds. The camera brought back pictures of unprecedented clarity from twice the height of earlier cameras. From the plane's altitude of 70,000 feet, it could capture objects on the ground as small as 2.5 feet across.

The camera had a built-in autofocus and light meter to automatically gauge the film exposure. To provide a stereo effect for photo interpretation of the 9"x18" negatives and to keep the plane's center of gravity rock-steady, the Kodak film was mounted in two containers, one on each wing. The film fed in opposite directions, simultaneously in two nine-inch rolls. Each magazine could carry more than a mile of film--enough to produce 4,000 pairs of images. From seven small windows in the hatch, the camera covered the landscape horizon-to-horizon.

The U-2 was also equipped with a 35 mm tracker camera that continuously scanned from horizon to horizon to provide the photo interpreters with an accurate track of the entire flight path of the aircraft.