🚀 Inventions and machines 📡 Communication

Cameras

📖 In short

A camera is a machine that takes pictures and records films. The word “camera” comes from Latin and means “room”, because the first camera was a dark room that light came into through a tiny hole! Today almost every phone has a little camera.

🤩 Did you know?

The first permanent photograph was made in 1826.
Some old cameras used film 35 millimeters wide.
Ibn al-Haytham is called “the father of optics”.
A digital picture is made of tiny colored dots called pixels.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 The dark room

About a thousand years ago the Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham studied how light comes through a tiny hole into a dark room and makes an upside-down picture of the outside on the opposite wall. The camera grew out of this idea.

🔍 How does it work?

A camera has a lens that gathers light, a small opening that opens and closes very fast to let light in, and a place where the picture is recorded: light-sensitive film in old cameras, or an electronic sensor in digital cameras.

💡 From film to digital

Pictures used to be recorded on film that had to be developed in a darkroom with chemicals. A digital camera stores the picture in memory, so we see it straight away on the screen.

🎯 Amazing cameras

There are cameras that take pictures under water, cameras on satellites that photograph the Earth, very fast cameras that film a falling drop of water, and tiny cameras a patient swallows so the doctor can see inside their body.