THE 12 BIGGEST BREAKTHROUGHS IN PHOTO TECHNOLOGY STORY LIBRARY by Allan Morey
1 The Camera Obscura Turns the World Upside Down No one knows when people first noticed a strange optical illusion When light from the sun shines through a small hole and into a darkened room it creates an image The image appears on the wall opposite the hole It shows the scene outside the room The image is upside down That is because light travels in a straight line Light from the bottom of the outdoor scene shines up through the hole to the top of the wall Light from the top of the scene travels down through the hole to the bottom of the wall This image became known as camera obscura These are the Latin words for dark room By the early 1500s people were building box-size devices called camera obscuras But the images these made were not very clear A camera obscura from 1800 44
Italian scientist Daniel Barbaro placed a lens in the hole of a camera obscura The image it created was much clearer and brighter The image could be focused onto a surface such as a sheet of paper People could trace around it to make drawings or paintings In the late 1600s German scientist Johann Zahn came up with more ideas to improve the camera obscura For example adding a mirror allowed the image to be projected This type of camera obscura became popular in the 1800s Large ones were built in coastal towns They projected images of the seaside for tourists to view 55 400 BCE Year a Chinese philosopher named Mozi wrote about a camera obscura image This was the first recorded mention Camera obscura is the Latin phrase for dark room Images from a camera obscura appear upside down Camera obscuras were popular tourist attractions
