The Father of Optics is the Man Who Created Camera [part 3]

Like many eminent philosophers and mathematicians, Ibn Al-Haytham was a keen observer. While in a room one day he noticed light coming through a small hole made in the window shutters. It fell onto the wall opposite and it was the half-moon shape of the sun’s image during eclipses. He said: ‘The image of the sun at the time of the eclipse, unless it is total, demonstrates that when its light passes through a narrow, round hole and is cast on a place opposite to the hole it takes on the form of a moon-sickle.’

From his experiments, he explained that light travelled in a straight line and when the rays were reflected off a bright subject they passed through the small hole and did not scatter but crossed and reformed as an upside-down image on a flat white surface parallel to the hole. He then established that the smaller the hole, the clearer the picture.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    *Camera Obscura

His experimental conclusions were that when the sunlight reached and penetrated the hole, it made a conic shape at the meeting point with the pinhole, and later formed another conic shape in reverse to the first one on the opposite wall in the dark room.

‘Light issues in all directions opposite any body that is illuminated with any light [and of course, also opposite any self-luminous body]. Therefore when the eye is opposite a visible object and the object is illuminated with light of any sort, light comes to the surface of the eye from the light of the visible object.’(10th-century Ibn al-Haytham from his ‘Book of Optics)

In later stages, these discoveries led to the invention of the camera obscura, and Ibn Al-Haytham built the first camera, a camera obscura or pinhole camera, in history. He went on to explain that we see objects upright and not upside-down, as the camera does, because of the connection of he optic nerve with the brain, which analyses and defines the image.

During his practical experiments, Ibn Al-Haytham often used the term al-Bayt al-Muthim, which was translated into Latin as camera obscura, or dark, private or closed room or enclosed space. Camera is still used today, as is qamara in Arabic which still means a private or dark room.

Many of Ibn Al-Haytham’s works, especially his huge Book of Optics, were translated into Latin by the medieval scholar Gerard of Cremona. This has a profound impact on the 13th-century big thinkers like Roger Bacon and Witelo, and even on the 15th-century works of Leonardo da Vinci.

Today, the camera has gone from the humble beginnings of Ibn-Al-Haytham’s dark front room, the qamara, to become a sophisticated digital process, while the study of optics has blossomed into a whole science covering lasers, optical sectioning of the human retina and researching red bioluminescence in jelly fish.