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for sketching. Portable camera obscuras like these were
used by the inventors of photography and are the direct
precursors of the photographic camera.
The fi rst photographic camera to go on public sale
was manufactured by Alphonse Giroux in 1839. This
was an adaptation of a camera obscura design and
consisted of two wooden boxes, one sliding within the
other, one fi tted with the lens and the other holding the
focusing screen and plate holder. Throughout the 1840s
and 1850s, the sliding box design was the standard for
general photography. Sliding box cameras had a number
of advantages—they were robust and simple to make
and use. However, they were heavy and bulky to carry
around. To try and solve this problem, several manufac-
turers produced folding, collapsible versions of sliding
box cameras. With the lens panel and focussing screen
removed, hinged side panels could be collapsed to make
a compact package. Most cameras were simple, wooden
boxes, but there were some novel and ingenious uses
of other materials and designs for specifi c applications.
For example, Voigtlander’s conical all-metal camera for
daguerreotype portraits.
The camera design most popularly associated with
the Victorian period is the folding stand camera, fi tted
with bellows. Several designs for folding cameras fi t-
ted with fl exible bodies in place of solid wooden boxes
appeared in the early 1850s. These used cloth bags and
struts. In 1857, a camera design which used pleated
bellows was patented by the Scottish photographer,
Kinnear. Kinnear’s design became the standard and was
copied by most manufacturers. By the 1860s, folding
bellows cameras had become established as the tool for
general photography. There were many different manu-
facturers and variants but most differed from each other
only in detail, the basic design remaining unchanged
until well into the twentieth century. Folding bellows
cameras were produced in a range of formats and for a
variety of applications—for example, twin lens cameras
for stereoscopic photography and large format cameras
on heavy stands for studio-based portraiture.
The introduction of commercially manufactured gela-
tine dry plates in the late 1870s made ‘instantaneous’
exposures fully practical for the fi rst time and the fi rst
cameras designed to be used whilst held in the hand
camera appeared. Hand cameras developed along three
distinct lines—box-form or ‘detective’ cameras; folding
or strut cameras; and hand and stand cameras.
In 1881, Thomas Bolas took out a British patent for
a box-form plate camera. Because it could be used in
the hand, inconspicuously, he coined the name ‘detec-
tive camera’ for his invention. The term came to be
applied to almost all hand cameras that appeared up to
the end of the century. Following their initial novelty,
box-form plate cameras became less popular during
the 1890s. In their place appeared a variety of compact
collapsing hand cameras in which the lens panel pulled
out, attached to a bag or bellows, and was locked in
position by struts.
Most detective cameras were simple wooden boxes,
sometimes covered in leather or even brown paper so
as to resemble bags or parcels. Some, however, took
concealment a stage further. During the 1880s large
numbers of disguised cameras appeared, designed to
resemble, for example, books or watches or to be hidden
in ties, hats or walking sticks or under worn beneath a
waistcoat.
During the 1880s a number of designs appeared for
hand cameras that held a number of plates that could be
exposed successively, thus doing away with the need to
change plate holders after each exposure. Incorporat-
ing ingenious plate changing arrangements, these were
known as magazine plate cameras and enjoyed their
greatest popularity in the 1890s. However, by this time,
hand cameras which used roll fi lm instead of glass plates
were becoming increasingly popular.
Roll-holders, which used bands of sensitised paper as
an alternative to glass plates fi rst appeared in the 1850s
but the fi rst to enjoy any commercial success was de-
signed by George Eastman and William Walker in 1885.
Eastman subsequently worked on incorporating his roll-
holder into a simple camera and in 1888 he introduced
his detective camera which gave one hundred exposures
on sensitised paper fi lm. Eastman decided to create a
new trade name for his camera—a name that would be
novel, distinctive and easily pronounced in most lan-
guages. The name he came up with was ‘Kodak.’
The Kodak camera was successful from the start and
it was followed during the 1890s by a range of folding
and box-form Kodak roll fi lm cameras of various for-
mats. In 1900 the fi rst Brownie camera was introduced
—the camera that was to become synonymous with
snapshot photography and was to transform the medium
into a truly popular pastime.
The early years of photography were characterised
by a limited range of camera designs, which served for
a very wide range of applications. However, the end of
the nineteenth century witnessed an absolute profusion
of camera designs, refl ected in over a thousand pages
of advertisements in the British Journal Photographic
Almanac. Long established family businesses using craft
techniques competed with international corporations
exploiting the economics of mass production. The use
of traditional materials such as mahogany continued but
metal became increasingly used in camera manufac-
ture. Folding bellows stand cameras rubbed shoulders
with refl ex and magazine hand cameras. Plate cameras
competed with roll fi lm models and there were cam-
eras aimed specifi cally at the amateur or professional
market—from Brownies for family snapshots to strut
cameras for press photography. In addition, there were