In the fifth century B.C. in China, the philosopher Mo Ti (ca. 470 B.C.–391 B.C.) made the first recorded observation that light passing through a small hole into a dark chamber created an inverted but exact image of the scene outside the chamber. In the 10th century, an Arabian scholar, Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn Al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040), discovered that the image thus seen was made clearer with a smaller hole or aperture.
Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–92) in the 13th century and Reinerius Gemma-Frisius (1508–55) in the 16th century made similar observations. The phenomenon these men observed was the basis for the camera obscura, formally developed during the Renaissance.
Initially, a camera obscura (literally ‘dark room’) was an actual room with a tiny opening in one wall that permitted an image of the outside to be projected on the opposite wall. It could then be drawn or traced by the artist standing in the room. A number of 16th-century scholars, including Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Girolamo Cardano (1501–76), Erasmus Reinhold (1511–33), and Gemma-Frisius, all recorded descriptions of camera obscurae; no one knows who first invented the device.
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(Via Essential Knowledge of the Day.)
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