Years before Kodak released its panoramic camera, the company's founder gave explorer Hiram Bingham a specially outfitted version to take on his groundbreaking expedition to Peru.
These Stunning Pictures Revealed Machu Picchu to the World
In 1913, National Geographic published these panoramas of the ancient city, rediscovered two years before.
One hundred and six years ago today, while searching for a lost Incan capital, a 35-year-old American explorer named Hiram Bingham was led to a mountaintop in the Urubamba valley of Peru. The area he entered resembled a tropical rainforest, but soon he began to make out walls and buildings. The granite blocks "were beautifully fitted together in the most refined style of Inca architecture," he recalled two years later in an account for National Geographic. As the scale of the 400-year-old site unfolded, Bingham realized that "Machu Picchu might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America since the days of the Spanish conquest."
Before departing from the mountain and the unearthed ruins
