William Eisenberg was born in 1920 and raised in Philadelphia, PA. Prior to military service he was employed as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on the construction of the USS New Jersey. He served in the Army Air Forces from 1942 until the end of the war in 1945, primarily as a reconnaissance photographer. He was assigned to a B-24 squadron in the Aleutian Islands, for which he received an Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with two bronze battle stars. He was assigned to a B-29 squadron stationed in Clovis, NM, preparing for redeployment to Japan when the war ended. After the war and until the early 1950s he worked for the Navy Aeronautical Photographic Experimental Lab. One of his assignments during that time was to provide the still photography to document some of the earliest jet carrier landings in 1948. Photography became his professional vocation, but his interest in aviation and later space flight continued. When asked late in life about the most significant event that he had witnessed in his lifetime (excluding family) without hesitation he said man landing on the moon.