The Ashmolean, Pt. 1

I had planed to go the Ashmolean's Museum of Art and Archaeology yesterday but it was closed due to the nearby St. Giles Fair, which is pretty much like an average American street festival, with the exception of the the jarring incongruities of Tilt-a-Whirls and martyr's monuments.

So instead I went the Ashmolean's Museum of the History Science, which also happens to be where Stuart is trying to get me in to do some research for my prehistory of the cinema/archaeology of vision tutorial. But I'm not mentioning that again because I'm not going to jinx it.

Anyway, they had an amazing collection of Renaissance and Enlightenment era optical devices and some really impressive early photographic and cinematic artifacts. Sorry if some of the pictures are badly focused, you can't use a flash in the Museum. I just hope you can appreciate the irony of the fact that the photos couldn't be focused due to the bad light in the physical optics gallery.

This is Lawrence of Arabia's camera.

Here is Lewis Carol's ( the Oxonian of 'Alice in Wonderland' fame) camera. The museum has delicately avoided mentioning all the children whom Carol had pose before this camera in various states of undress. He was a perv.

This one is a very early camera that I think still used Daguerre's photographic process.

A stereoscope, it's like Victorian 3D glasses.

Here is a late 19th century magic lantern, a forerunner of the film projector. The Victorians would put panes of glass intricately painted with different scenes and figure into the magic lantern and project them into darkened rooms. How cool would it be to get to see some! I've never seen one but this passage, here, from 'Swann's Way' really helps to conjure their spectral presence. See paragraphs 11-13. C'est supercool!
These are some early motion picture cameras.

They also had a camera obscura--something else I'd only read about--which could actually be used! The name is Latin for 'dark chamber,' it's basically a way to project an image of a landscape or other light source onto a surface. Aristotle used a primitive form of the principle to watch an eclipse, the old pinhole in a dixie cup from grade school. This is a more advanced application of the same idea, using lenses and mirrors. To see the image, you poke your head under the sheet.

The aperture faces a light source.

And the image appears inside!

Pretty neat, huh? It's the white house with green shutters across the street.See:

Da Vinci and others would use these things as drawing aides.I saw more stuff there, but I'll save it for another post.