Developing the Camera Obscura
Early Example of Photographic Technology: Ancestor of Modern Camera
It often shocks people to realize that the forerunners of modern cameras were not created even one or two hundred years ago. In reality, it's been nearly a millennium.
It is remarkably simple to take pictures today. Since the advent of digital technology, there really is nothing to it. Just point, click, review, realize that you were smiling funny, delete and then repeat the steps all over again. The entire process takes about a minute and no expensive film is wasted. Later, you simply download the photos onto a computer or print them out and there you have it. It’s cheap and easy, and now just about anyone can try their hand at photography.
Looking back just a few years, before the takeover of digital technology, taking pictures was a much more time consuming and expensive process. A single roll of film was cherished – only the perfect pictures were taken, and even then the task of getting them developed could be surprisingly troublesome and time consuming.
This being said, imagine what it must have been like 900 years ago, when the world's first-ever camera was invented. Maybe the 1980s don’t look so bad after all.
The First Camera
Today it probably wouldn’t even be recognizable as a camera (and in truth, calling it a “camera” in the modern sense may be a bit misleading), but in essence it worked on a similar principal. The English word camera comes, in fact, from the Latin term used to describe this very first piece of photographic equipment; camera obscura, meaning "dark room."
The invention of the camera obscura is attributed to an Arab gentleman named Hassan ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib (better known today as Hasan ibn Ali, or better yet, simply Al-Hasan) at some point in the early 11th century, though in his lifetime he never did realize exactly what it was he'd accomplished. While performing experiments in the field of optics and light (a hobby of his, apparently), Al-Hasan created a room, completely closed off to all light apart from a tiny pinprick hole in the wall. The cone of light filtered through this small hole projected images of the outside world onto the inner wall of the room, which is, roughly, the same principle under which even modern cameras work.
It wasn't until the 16th century that artists began to use the camera obscura as a tool for capturing images of the world, though the only way to truly do so was to place a piece of paper or canvas on the wall and to trace the image that appeared inside the dark room.
The Modern Camera at Last
It wasn't until the early 19th century (1826, to be exact) that a French inventor named Nicephore Niepce took the first real photograph with the first real method of photography, using the principals of the camera obscura and adding to it a knowledge of chemistry, wherein the image that arrived in the camera became embedded onto a pewter plate covered with all sorts of chemicals. Thirty five years later, in 1861, physicist James Clerk Maxwell became the first person to take a color photograph using filters of three different colors and the superimposing them onto one another.
And now, after using this same method for nearly two hundred years, human beings are finally prepared to move onto the next stage of photography – digital.
It’s about time.
References:
- Gribbin, J. (2002). The Scientists: A History of the Science Told Through the Lives of its Greatest Inventors. New York: Random House.
