In that era, possibly a “hydrogen balloon” would have been feasible to get an unmanned, ground controlled camera aloft, but it would have needed to be a really big one.
My great grandfather’s cameras from a decade later were still pretty hefty equipment. He lugged a bunch of stuff around on an old Indian cycle when he was a surveyor in Michigan’s upper peninsula.
All his old glass plates and negatives are stored in a museum these days.
I really should talk to the museum about accessing them and developing them to digital format. These days a flatbed scanner and photoshop will do the job.