Camera obscura (Alhazen)
Cámara oscura (análisis de Alhacén)
- Date
- c. 1021 · confidence high
- Place
- Cairo, Egypt
- Credited to
- Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)
- People
- 👤 Alhacén965–1038
- Field
- Communication
What it is
A dark room with a small aperture through which an inverted image of the outside is projected, used by Alhazen to demonstrate that light travels in straight lines and that vision works by rays entering the eye. The first experimental optical instrument.
Mozi (China, 5th century BCE) and Aristotle had described the phenomenon; Alhazen turned it into an instrument of experimentation.
What it led to
- the modern theory of vision (Kitab al-Manazir, the Book of Optics)
- the safe observation of eclipses and astronomy
- Renaissance linear perspective and, in the long term, photography
Built on
- Mozi's and Aristotle's observations of the pinhole
- Ptolemy's and Euclid's optics