A "camera" in 1818?

[Joel S. Berson]

Thank you, Chris and Michael Quinion.  I had not imagined portable
camera obscura (I won't attempt a plural!), since the only two I
remember were installed in their own private tower rooms.  (And I now
do remember the San Francisco one, which I visited many years ago.)

The source is _The diary of William Bentley, D.D., pastor of the East
Church, Salem, Massachusetts_.  And yes, I knew that 1818 was a
decade or so too early for a photographic camera.

Joel

At 12/1/2008 03:19 AM, Chris Waigl wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
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>On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:38:01 -0500, "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>wrote:
>
> > 1818 Jan 8.  "His camera exhibited as near life as such a thing can
> > particularly some fine paintings & colourings of refuse. His views of
> > Rome were next, the other plates were of less perfect character & of
> > diminished effect."
>
>This is the kind of cite where some indication of the provenance would help
>to contextualize it.
>
> > What kind of camera is meant here, and what are the "plates"?
>
>I'd expect this to be hand-painted plates, and a portable camera obscura.
>
> > I think of a camera obscura, but then I don't know what "plates"
> > refers to.  A camera obscura would have a glass plate on which the
> > image was projected, but that wouldn't be the "views of Rome" and
> > "the other plates".  Or, if this camera were indoors, perhaps these
> > plates were placed before the lens so they would be projected on the
> > camera obscura's viewing plate?  And I assume these plates were not
> > photographic in 1818.
>
>If 1818 is correct, this pre-dates the earliest examples of photography by
>about a decade. However, camerae obscurae as painting aids appear to have
>been not uncommon during that period.
>
> > (The only camera obscura I can recall seeing was in "Stairway to
> > Heaven" (AKA "A Matter of Life and Death"), released 1946, and it was
> > very impressive.)
>
>(The one in San Francisco, next to the Beach House, is also pretty cool.)
>
>Chris Waigl
>
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