The advance of photography : its history and modern applications (1911)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

6 THE ADVANCE OF PHOTOGRAPHY It is clear that by the process of Wedgwood and Davy only flat bodies could be copied, and, notwithstanding all the improvements of which the process was still susceptible, it admitted of only a limited application. The Camera Obscura. — But Wedgwood had already conceived the idea of the possibility of producing pictures of any bodies whatsoever by the action of light on sensitized paper. He tried to effect this by the aid of an interesting optical instrument which has the property of forming flat images of solid objects. This instrument is the camera obscura. The origin of this camera is by no means certain ; it has been attributed by some to Leonardo da Vinci, and by others to Porta, and although there is no mention in their writings of any apparatus of this nature, it is probable that a form of this camera was introduced by da Vinci at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and an improved form by Porta about the middle of that century. That it was possible to project outside objects through a small hole into a darkened room was known by Euclid, and Levi ben Gerson appears to have made some apparatus at the beginning of the fourteenth century for this purpose. The first record of apparatus of this kind was Alberti's show-box somewhere about the year 1437, and the first instance in which a definite mention occurs of the use of a convex lens in connection with the camera appears to be in D. Barbaro's " Treatise on Perspective/' 1568. The first portable camera obscura was in all probability made by Kepler. The formation of the image by means of this instrument will be easily understood from the following brief description. If a small hole be made in the window shutter of a completely darkened room on a sunny day, a clear image of the landscape will be seen on the opposite wall of the room. Let a be a poplar, o the hole, and w the back wall of the