The principle: A lightproof box - "Camera Obscura" comes from Latin and means "dark chamber" - is provided with a small hole and is therefore often briefly called a pinhole camera. Through the hole (aperture), the image is projected from the outside onto the back wall of the box (room), but upside down (but not inverted) but colored and live!

The photo camera and the human eye work according to this system.

Even without electronics, which we encounter today in mass articles such as video technology, it is possible with the simplest means (dark room, hole, mirror, white plate) to reproduce a moving and color-fast image.

History of the camera obscura:

 Camera Obscura's might belong to the oldest discoveries of mankind.

Already Aristotle (384 to 322 BC) described this phenomenon in his work "Problemata" and recognized that the light from the sun to the hole and from these to the earth forms a double cone and therefore the crescents of the sun are imaged upside down. Aristotle had recognized and described the basic principle of the Camera Obscura without knowing what significance this discovery would have in the future.

 The Englishman Roger Bacon (1214-1294) dealt in great detail with the phenomena of solar eclipses and built functional apparatuses in the form of Camera Obscura's.

 Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) dealt in more detail with the phenomena in the Camera Obscura. As part of his research on light and optics, he also made the first drawings of the Camera Obscura and its ray path. Leonardo da Vinci also recognized that our eye is constructed like a camera obscura.