Читать книгу Magic Shadows. The Story of the Origin of Motion Pictures онлайн

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Porta concluded this account with a description of how to use the camera in order to observe an eclipse, something which Bacon or one of his contemporaries had already worked out. Before good instruments were developed, the room camera was an excellent device to save the astronomer’s eyesight and still give him a good view of an eclipse. The giant 200-inch telescope at Palomar in California is closely related to the original use of the camera for astronomical work.

There does not seem to be any evidence that Porta developed a portable camera, the direct ancestor of the modern photographic camera. He also did not appear to have much success with his lenses, as he found the concave mirrors as good as or better than a camera obscura with a lens.

The general subject of the chapter which included the camera was “Herein Are Propounded Burning Glasses” “and the Wonderful Sights to be Seen by Them.” (Recall Archimedes and his Burning Glasses.) Let Porta tell it: “What could be seen more wonderful, than that by reciprocal strokes of reflexion, images should appear outwardly hanging in the air and yet neither the visible object nor the glass seen? that they may seem not to be repercussions of the glasses, but spirits of vain phantasms.”