253
1864 was a commercial successful and available in the
1870s in a variety of designs and plate sizes. The camera
was patented by G. J. Bourdin in 1864 and contained
a ceramic interior lining and an opening in the top
which allowed a pipette to insert and remove process-
ing chemicals. The camera back on some models held
a red window for visual inspection. Allied to this were
ferrotype or tintype cameras, producing photographs
on metal plates within a few minutes, which gained
popularity from the 1880s and variety of designs were
produced by Fallowfi eld and other makers.
The end of the nineteenth century saw the introduc-
tion of three-colour cameras Frederick Ives’s Krömsköp
camera, viewer and projector were introduced from
- Louis Ducos du Hauron’a Chromographoscope
of 1879 and Melanochromoscope of 1897 were all one-
shot three-colour cameras. The next century would see
these developed further.
Multiple lens cameras for producing cartes-de-visite,
cabinet and Gem and stamp cameras were introduced
from 1860 and remained popular in different forms
throughout the century as studio cameras.
Specialised cameras were also designed for photo-
micrography. Many of the large scientifi c instrument
makers such as Smith, Beck and Beck, Negretti and
Zambra, John Browning and others produced cameras
designed to be attached to microscopes from the 1860s
onwards and these were developed and refi ned through-
out the century. Collodion negatives with their sharp
defi nition made possible micophotograptihic cameras
for producing very small negatives of large objects for
use in Stanhopes and on microscope slides. J. B. Dancer
produced the fi rst of these in 1856 but the best known
was René Dagron’s camera of 1860 which, via a repeat-
ing back, made 450 exposures 2 × 2mm on 4.5 × 8.5cm
plates. The camera had twenty-fi ve lenses.
The fi rst novelty cameras in the sense of being very
different to standard cameras date back to December
1858 when Thomas Skaife introduced his Pistograph
camera. The metal camera produced circular negatives 1
inch diameter on wet-collodion plates. Thomas Ottewill
produced a camera clearly based on the Pistolograph in - A similar camera was produced by Marion and
Co in 1884 as their All Metal Miniature camera for 1¼
inch square dry plates. The Kombi of 1893 was square
metal boxform camera taking 1 inch negatives on roll
fi lm. The camera was also used to view the negatives.
Other cameras such as the Escopette of 1889 and metal
Demon of 1893 were of novel shape.
Cameras disguised as other objects start with the
Thompson revolver camera of 1862 which was made
by A. Briois in Paris. The camera made four exposures
on a 7.5 cm diameter glass plate. Nicour’s Photo-Bin-
ocular camera of 1867 appeared in the form of a pair
of binoculars with a circular magazine holding 50 1½
inch square glass plates mounted on top. The 1880s and
1890s saw the greatest craze for disguised cameras when
dry plates and roll fi lm, faster lenses and a wider range
of metals and construction techniques to make cameras
allowed designer’s ideas to be fulfi lled. E. Enjalbert’s
Photo-Revolver de Poche of 1883 was designed using
real revolver parts and made ten exposures on 2 × 2 cm
plates. Stirn’s Vest camera of 1886 was based on R. D.
Gray’s American patent and was designed to be hidden
behind a waistcoat with the lens poking through a button
hole. Krügener’s book camera of 1889 was sold in dif-
ferent countries under different name and the Lancaster
patent watch camera of 1886 was the fi rst of a number
of cameras disguised as pocket watches.
Cameras were also disguised as satchels, a group
of books, binoculars, walking sticks, hats and cravatte.
Some produced photographs that were acceptable within
the limits of the negative size and lens, others, especially
later on were novelties in the worst sense of the word
and little more than toys.
Michael PritchardSee Also: Camera Design: 4 late (1850–1900);
Daguerreotype; Cartes-de-Visite; Collodion
Negatives; and Ottewill, Thomas.Further Reading
Coe, Brian, Cameras. From daguerreotype to Instant Pictures,
London, Marshall Cavendish, 1978.
Patents for Invention. Abridgments of Specifi cations. Class 98.
Photography 1855–1900, London, His Majesty’s Stationary
Offi ce.
Lothrop, Easton S, A Century of Cameras, New York, Morgan
and Morgan, 1973.
Pritchard, Michael and St Denny, Douglas, Spy Camera. A
Century of Detective and Subminiature Cameras, London,
Classic Collection, 1993.
Smith, R C, Antique Cameras, Newton Abbot, David & Charles,
1975.CAMERA DESIGN: GENERAL
It may seem like an anachronism but the discovery and
use of the camera actually precedes the discovery of
photography by hundreds of years. The phenomenon of
the camera obscura (Latin for ‘dark room’) had been
known since ancient times. If a small hole is made in the
window blind of a darkened room, an inverted image of
the scene outside the window is produced on the oppo-
site wall of the room. A clear description of the camera
obscura is contained in the manuscripts of Leonardo
da Vinci in the fi fteenth century and by the middle of
the sixteenth century, lenses had begun to be used to
increase the brightness and sharpness of the image. By
the seventeenth century, portable box-form versions had
appeared and these were used widely by artists as aids