Johannes Meiner (1867–1941) ran a photographic studio in Zurich’s Metropol House, working across all genres: portraits, architecture, urban views, advertising. His speciality was stereoscopy — a format whose square constraint, once reframed, fits naturally into the Karo. His plates document Zurich between approximately 1890 and 1920, and are today held at the Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich, the institution in collaboration with which this selection was assembled by Ylva Meyer.
The 4th Coupe Aéronautique Gordon Bennett was held on 3 October 1909 at the Schlieren gasworks, on the western edge of Zurich — the most complex logistical undertaking in the race’s brief history to that point. Eighteen crews from several nations were entered. The inflation of the balloons required 44,000 cubic metres of gas and over 1,250 personnel: 150 men from the balloon company, 700 from the Zurich garrison, and 400 from local athletics clubs. The tramway alone transported an estimated 400,000 persons that day — a figure the chronicles describe as the highest traffic the city had ever seen, never again surpassed at a Swiss air event. The defending Swiss champion Theodor Schaeck — Oberst of the General Staff and founder of the Swiss Aero Club — flew Helvetia for the third consecutive Gordon Bennett. The race was won by the American crew Edgar W. Mix and André Roussel aboard America II, who covered 1,211 kilometres to land near Ostroleka, northeast of Warsaw, in 35 hours and 7 minutes. The event was timed by Omega.
Meiner did not photograph the launch panorama. He placed himself directly beneath one balloon during the inflation phase, looking through its net toward the others. The foreground is working infrastructure: a rope cordon separates spectators from the preparation area, wooden barrels mark the gas distribution points, sandbags lie on the ground as ballast. The balloon above fills the frame entirely — not as spectacle but as physical fact, an object of enormous scale encountered from below. The crowd behind the rope watches; the workers inside it do not.
The plate
Stereoscopic glass slide titled “Zürich, Gordon-Bennet-Wettfliegen 1909, unter d. Ballon.” Selected from the Johannes Meiner holdings at the Baugeschichtliches Archiv der Stadt Zürich. Dated October 1909, Gordon Bennett race, Schlieren. Piezography® Pro print on Awagami Bamboo Washi, 250 g/m² — made by the Awagami Factory in Tokushima, Japan, directed by the Fujimori family for eight generations, within a washi tradition in the Awa region dating to the 7th century. 30 × 30 cm. Edition of 200, Zürich.
