earlier cameras

[Scarecrow]

how early could we have cameras/photography? i like the idea of medieval photographers, maybe alchemists discover photography?

 

[Forum Lurker]

The earliest you could see it is the late 8th century in Mesopotamia, from Jabir ibn Hayyan; it's more likely to wait until Grosseteste and Bacon in the 13th.

 

[wkwillis]

The earliest camera techology was photpolymerisation of bitumen. Use a camera obscura and severl months to get landscape pictures. Discover the technique by accident somehow?
A camera obscura is a hole in a way opposite a view. A bitumen photopolymerisation negative is when UV from sunlight polymerises olefins (cracked alkanes from an oil deposit that has been thermally heated to 'crack' the alkanes) and then the polymerised olefins resist being disolved by light weight alkanes like propane, butane, and pentane, leaving the polymerised olefin material behind as a negative and as the positive, too, come to think of it. Someone would have to coat a wall opposite the wall with the hole in it, perhaps as water proofing or something, and then leave the image alone for a few months and let it 'etch' itself in the bitumen. When he comes back he figures he's got a commercial product there and starts making images of cities and mountains to sell as murals for walls.

 

[Forum Lurker]

Without the scientific method, the fellow's much more likely to assume that it's an act of God; even nowadays, we see hundreds of thousands of people willing to believe that entirely random images are icons of the Virgin Mary.

 

[Nik]

Turin Shroud ??

IIRC, one of the debunkers managed to duplicate the Turin Shroud's pattern using a primitive photographic set-up and crudely photo-sensitised fabric.

Er, I say 'photography' because I can't remember the proper term for the proto-photographic technique...