Another inventor is the tenth century optician and physicist Abu Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham, simply known as al-Haytham, who invented the pinhole camera and discovered how the eye works.
The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to realize that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haytham. He invented the first pinhole camera after …show more content…
So what is a pinhole camera? It is essentially a small-enclosed box with a tiny hole placed on one of the sides. When light is allowed to entire through the tiny hole, an image of the object directly outside the hole is projected onto the opposite side of the box. We will explore pinhole camera history a little deeper so you learn more about how they first came into being. Many scientists and others observed and wrote about the phenomenon from the ancient Chinese to the Greeks. But it wasn't until the 11th century that someone actually wrote about the principals of the pinhole camera and created the camera obscura to study it. Ibn al-Haytham wrote his "Book of Optics" in 1021, and created his own pinhole camera, then later the camera obscura.
Al-Haytham discovered he could sharpen his reflected, inverted image by shrinking the pinhole or aperture. Essentially, a pinhole camera is a light-tight box, usually rounded like an oatmeal box, with a pinhole in one side. The image outside the camera is projected through the pinhole where it is reversed and shown upside down on the rear of the box. With no film yet available to record the image, al-Haytham constructed the camera obscura, which is a room-sized pinhole camera where the observer can get inside the apparatus and observe the