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specialised cameras for specifi c formats and applications
such as stereo, panoramic and studio photography. In a
period of sixty years, camera design had undergone a
radical transformation, from hand-made wooden boxes
to mass-produced precision engineering products.
Colin Harding
See Also: Camera Design: 1 (1830–1840); Camera
Design: 2 (1850); Camera Design: 3 (1860–1870);
Camera Design: 4 late (1850–1900) Studio cameras;
Camera Design: 5 Portable Hand Cameras (1880–
1900); Camera Design: 6 Kodak (1888–1900);
Camera Design: 7 Specialist and novelty cameras;
Camera Design: Panoramic Cameras; and Camera
Design: Stereo Cameras.
Further Reading
Coe, Brian, Cameras: From Daguerreotypes to Instant Pictures,
Nordbok, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1978.
CAMERA DESIGN: PANORAMIC
CAMERAS
The history of panoramic photography can be traced
back to the earliest days of the medium. William Henry
Fox Talbot, for example, produced panoramic views
in the early 1840s by rotating his camera after each
exposure so as to produce a series of photographs,
each overlapping the previous view slightly. Sequential
panoramas such as these do not require a special cam-
era. Soon, however, cameras designed specifi cally for
making panoramic photographs in a single operation
appeared. Panoramic cameras can be classifi ed into three
broad categories: cameras with rotating lenses and fi xed
plates or fi lms; rotating cameras with moving plates or
fi lms; and, fi nally, cameras fi tted with wide-angle lenses.
Examples of all three types of panoramic camera were
produced concurrently during the nineteenth century.
The fi rst patent for a fi xed-plate, rotating-lens pan-
oramic camera was granted to an Austrian chemist,
Joseph Puchberger, in 1843. His camera combined a
curved daguerreotype plate with a lens that rotated by
turning a hand crank, giving an image with an angle of
view of about 150 degrees. Much better known is a cam-
era designed on a very similar principle the following
year by Friedrich von Martens, a German living in Paris.
Called the Megaskop, this also produced panoramic da-
guerreotypes on curved plates. In 1856, Ludwig Schul-
ler, Martens’ nephew, used a version of this camera for
wet-plate photography on curved glass plates. In 1884,
P. Moessard was granted a patent for his Cylindrogra-
phe camera. This used paper negative fi lm in a curved
fl exible holder and covered up to 170 degrees with its
swivelling lens that was rotated manually by turning
the viewfi nder. The fi rst panoramic camera to be sold in
any quantity appeared in 1897. Made by the Multiscope
& Film Co. in Wisconsin, this rotating-lens, roll-fi lm
camera was called the Al Vista. The rotating lens was
driven by clockwork and covered an angle of nearly 180
degrees. Following the success of the Al Vista, Kodak
soon entered the panoramic market with a hand-held
snapshot panoramic camera. The fi rst panoramic Kodak
camera, the No. 4 Panoram Kodak, was introduced in- This covered an angle of 142 degrees and pro-
duced 3 inch by 12 inch negatives on roll-fi lm running
in a curve inside the back of the camera. Two traversing
speeds could be set for the lens by adjusting the tension
of a spring. In 1900, Kodak introduced another, similar
model, the No. 1 Panoram Kodak, which recorded a
slightly smaller angle of view. Panoram Kodak cameras
remained on the market until the 1920s and refl ected the
popularity of panoramic photography during the early
years of the twentieth century. Panoram Kodaks were
used by several prominent photographers of the time,
including George Davison. They could be used both
horizontally and, less commonly, vertically, to record
subjects such as trees, tall buildings or waterfalls.
The second group of panoramic cameras are those
that combine a rotating camera with a moving plate or
fi lm. In 1862, John R. Johnson and John A. Harrison
took out a patent for their Pantascopic camera that pro-
duced panoramic photographs by rotating the camera
and, at the same time, moving a glass plate. The camera
body was rotated by a clockwork motor. As the camera
rotated, a wet collodion plate was moved in synchro-
nism, past an exposing slot in the camera back, to record
an angle of view of 110 degrees. For cameras of this
type, roll-fi lm was much more convenient than glass
plates. Following the introduction of fl exible paper, then
celluloid, fi lm in the 1880s, a number of new designs
appeared based on a similar principle. These included
Stirn’s Wonder Panoramic camera of 1889, Damoizeau’s
Cyclographe camera of 1890 and Stewart’s Panoramic
camera of 1895. The best-known and most widely used
rotating and moving-fi lm panoramic camera appeared
at the beginning of the twentieth century. Patented in
1904, the Cirkut camera was produced in a variety of
models and sizes which all worked in essentially the
same way. The camera was rotated by a clockwork
motor which also moved the roll of fi lm past an expos-
ing slot in synchrony with the turning of the camera.
Cirkut cameras were still being produced in the 1940s
and were extremely popular for panoramic large group
photographs. Because the camera traversed relatively
slowly, it was possible for a person standing at the end
of the group where the camera started to run to the other
end of the group before the camera reached there—and
to magically appear twice on the same photograph.
The last, and least numerous, type of panoramic