Today, let me take your picture with a home-made
camera. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
The Latin word for a large
vaulted room is a camera. We get the
word chamber from it. A comrade is literally
someone who sits in the same room with you. The
thing we take pictures with is also called a
camera, and that comes from an ancient device
called a camera obscura -- literally a dark room.
Here's how it works:
You create a large room with only one light source
-- a tiny hole through one wall. That hole projects
an accurate image of the outside view on to the
opposite wall. Without film, you can't really "take
a picture" with it, but you can trace the image
with a pencil, if you want. Aristotle was familiar
with the idea, and medieval writers had a lot to
say about it.
When I was young, photographic film was pretty
slow, and it came in large sizes. We used the
camera obscura idea to make something called a
pinhole camera. We'd punch a pinhole in one end of
a shoebox and mount film in the opposite end, with
everything sealed up tightly. Then we'd point the
box at a subject, uncover the pinhole -- just for a
moment -- and we'd get a passable photograph.
Of course no one put film in a camera obscura until
the 19th century, but they were made with lenses as
early as the 16th century. The name camera obscura
was given by the astronomer Johann Kepler, who used
a fairly complicated lens system to make solar
observations with one in 1600. In the 17th century
the camera obscura was highly refined as an aid to
artists, and that's the period when we began to see
remarkable improvements in the way painters handled
perspective.
The interesting thing about all this is that
photography didn't have to fight for acceptance as
many inventions do. The camera itself had been
highly sophisticated for 200 years, and it just had
to wait for someone to invent a way of recording
the picture automatically. And that in turn had to
wait for eighteenth-century improvements in
chemistry.
The French lithographer Joseph Niepce finally made
the first photograph. It was an eight-hour exposure
of the view from his window, made in 1826. The
image was formed out of hardened bitumen on a
pewter photographic plate. It took him ten years of
experimentation to get there, but what he did was
to come up with the long-awaited solution to a
long-standing puzzle. After 2000 years, he finally
provided film for the camera obscura.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Newhall, B, The History of Photography. New
York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1964. This episode
has been greatly rewritten as Episode 1772.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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