Anybody else see this story about the 2000+ year old astronimical calculator?

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...ntgreekmachine
I know the greeks and egyptians knew about glass and I would bet lenses so I wonder if they actually may have had some sort of crude cameras even back then? The egg albumen process that was used in the early part of film history was not that chemically challenging even some of the silver processes used in the wet plate method would not have been outside of their chemical knowledge.

It has been said that there was a great deal of knowledge lost when the great library of Alexandria was looted and burned so I wonder if photography was actually known back then and then just lost over time?

[Daniel Bates]

A vision of an Egyptian WTD comic strip just popped into my head. Maybe there is one, carved on some forgotten wall...

[JohnT]

Originally Posted by DEMDeepEllumMusic

It has been said that there was a great deal of knowledge lost when the great library of Alexandria was looted and burned so I wonder if photography was actually known back then and then just lost over time?

Somehow, I doubt it. They were still carving things into walls and rocks back then.

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

If you read the article and see how sophisticated the machine was it would indicate that they had more science at their fingertips than we thought possible.

I know that there have been things discovered in the last few decades about the early Greeks and Romans about their sophistication in the arts and sciences that have had scientists thinking.

Really would you think that a photograph say using egg albumen would be around 600+ years later? We just have barely 150 years on the earliest modern photos and many of the earliest works are not in the best of shape now and heck over 90% of what was put to early celuloid in the first decades of Cinema is gone forever in less than 100 years!

[Duffy Pratt]

Yes, its little known that the pyramids were actually very large tripods.

Duffy

[JohnT]

I suppose it's possible that they were on the verge of a very rudimentary camera of sorts. With every turn of the archaeologist's spade, we're learning that there is much truth to that which was formerly considered myth.

[JohnT]

Originally Posted by Duffy Pratt

Yes, its little known that the pyramids were actually very large tripods.

Duffy

[Toad]

Didn't mythbusters show that some ancient people had crude forms of batteries?

[DEMDeepEllumMusic]

Batteries are not that hard, now powerful ones are but simple ones are not and to make a shutter you just need springs which they had. No it comes down to if they came across any way to make a chemical emulsion that was light sensitive because even using a non-lens pinhole box could work as a camera and they had knowledge of how to make glass and to be honest a crude lens can be made out of molten glass without too much trouble and I bet a guy figuring out how to polish that piece could improve the optics of the glass.

[johnastovall]

Originally Posted by DEMDeepEllumMusic

Batteries are not that hard, now powerful ones are but simple ones are not and to make a shutter you just need springs which they had. No it comes down to if they came across any way to make a chemical emulsion that was light sensitive because even using a non-lens pinhole box could work as a camera and they had knowledge of how to make glass and to be honest a crude lens can be made out of molten glass without too much trouble and I bet a guy figuring out how to polish that piece could improve the optics of the glass.

Lenses were well know in Greco-Roman times. Here's an abstract on one such find.

A more extentive paper.

And you don't need shutter. The cameras well into the 19th century used a lens cover.

The second part of a camera, the Camera Obscura goesback to the 5th Century BCE.

[Gordon]

I think what for me makes me think that they didn't have cameras or photography is the lack of perspective in the art of the time.

The camera obscura drove a revolution in drawing/ painting because it was used to get accurate perspective in drawing. You can see the effects on the art around the time it was invented.

The chemical processes and so on for recording images are as you say not that complex, but I suspect that if the techniques were known in earlier times, they would have influenced manual art as well as photography.

[kenw]

the so-called "lack of perspective" has been put to rest: it ain't so. The images without perspective (like those found in Egyptian tomb art) were done specifically that way. Something to do with distorting the human form would impact their after-life bodies. If you drew the hands small for example, their hands in the next world would be small.

It is somewhat telling that modern people are so quick to dismiss ancients; each time one of these discoveries are made all the experts on ancient civilizations have to scramble to re-write their doctoral pontifications.

Perhaps we aren't so advanced after all? gasp!

[johnastovall]

Originally Posted by kenw

the so-called "lack of perspective" has been put to rest: it ain't so. The images without perspective (like those found in Egyptian tomb art) were done specifically that way. Something to do with distorting the human form would impact their after-life bodies. If you drew the hands small for example, their hands in the next world would be small.

It is somewhat telling that modern people are so quick to dismiss ancients; each time one of these discoveries are made all the experts on ancient civilizations have to scramble to re-write their doctoral pontifications.

Perhaps we aren't so advanced after all? gasp!

That fails to explain the three tier prespective used in Classical Chinese painting and it's missing for Greek and Roman art except for very rough forms and no formal understanding of it.

[Stephen H]

It's hard to get a good grasp of what they did know.

I remember reading long ago that the Caesarean Section was called that because it was supposed to be how Julius Caesar was delivered. But it's hard to imagine the ancients doing that and both mother and baby surviving.

Working out the planetary details I don't see as being that challenging- I think other ancient cultures did as well. The challenging part is really keeping records for long enough to make useful observations. I've seen lunar eclipses, you've probably seen them, but we sure didn't mark it down on the calendar when it happened.

I think it's interesting how the guy speaks of this one-and-only ancient doohickey. Like some ancient Greek got up one morning, made one, and never thought to do it again. If they made one, different people are bound to have made a bunch of 'em at different times and places (and of different complexity and expense). Having to hand-cut the gears would be a major slowdown in the production. But if theypieces are delicate, they wouldn't survive well, and if made of brass, it could always be melted into something else when it wore out.

Someone mentioned pinhole cameras up there. You can make homemade "film" and pinhole cameras, but the two are not a good mix. It helps to have reasonably fast film OR an actual lens. Recall in the old days, people had to sit for a minute or more to make a portrait- even used neck braces and stuff to accomplish that.

As far as I know, the ancients never had plate glass as a common item, which puts a damper in some forms of photography.

[Gordon]

Originally Posted by kenw

the so-called "lack of perspective" has been put to rest: it ain't so. The images without perspective (like those found in Egyptian tomb art) were done specifically that way. Something to do with distorting the human form would impact their after-life bodies. If you drew the hands small for example, their hands in the next world would be small.

It is somewhat telling that modern people are so quick to dismiss ancients; each time one of these discoveries are made all the experts on ancient civilizations have to scramble to re-write their doctoral pontifications.

Perhaps we aren't so advanced after all? gasp!

Right - but you think _someone_ in some ancient civilization would have thought to use it for some styles of art, somewhere, if it existed.

The complete absence of it until the modern development of the camera obscura seems to hint that that was when it was actually first discovered.