- In this section of the site we bring you curated collections of images, books, audio and film, shining a light on curiosities and wonders from a wide range of online archives.
- With a leaning toward the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, we hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer – an archive of materials which truly celebrates the breadth and variety of our shared cultural commons and the minds that have made it.
- Some of our most popular posts include visions of the future from late 19th century France , a dictionary of Victorian slang and a film showing the very talented “hand-farting” farmer of Michigan .
- With each post including links back to the original source we encourage you to explore these wonderful online sources for yourself.
- Check out our Sources page to see where we find the content.
In 1685, the Würzburg cleric Johann Zahn published his Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium (The Long-Distance Artificial Eye, or Telescope). In the work he provides an early and comprehensive account of the function and usage of a number of optical instruments, including the camera obscura and magic lantern (whose invention he credits to Athanasius Kircher), and various other lanterns, slides, peepshow boxes, telescopes, microscopes, lenses, and reflectors. Among the studies is an envisaging, for the very first time, of a portable hand-held version of the camera obscura. At the heart of the imagined device is a mirror reflex mechanism, technology that would not see realisation until a century and a half later with the birth of the photographic camera. Zahn’s ideas and explanations are furnished by a plethora of innovative, and, at times, wonderfully surreal engravings, highlights of which we feature below.
@PublicDomainRev: Image from Johann Zahn’s treatise on optics Oculus Artificialis (1685). More here:
In 1685, the Würzburg cleric Johann Zahn published his Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium (The Long-Distance Artificial Eye, or Telescope). In the work he provides an early and comprehensive account of the function and usage of a number of optical instruments, including the camera obscura and magic lantern (whose invention he credits to Athanasius Kircher), and various other lanterns, slides, peepshow boxes, telescopes, microscopes, lenses, and reflectors. Among the studies is an envisaging, for the very first time, of a portable hand-held version of the camera obscura. At the heart of the imagined device is a mirror reflex mechanism, technology that would not see realisation until a century and a half later with the birth of the photographic camera. Zahn’s ideas and explanations are furnished by a plethora of innovative, and, at times, wonderfully surreal engravings, highlights of which we feature below.
In this section of the site we bring you curated collections of images, books, audio and film, shining a light on curiosities and wonders from a wide range of online archives. With a leaning toward the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, we hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer – an archive of materials which truly celebrates the breadth and variety of our shared cultural commons and the minds that have made it. Some of our most popular posts include visions of the future from late 19th century France, a dictionary of Victorian slang and a film showing the very talented “hand-farting” farmer of Michigan. With each post including links back to the original source we encourage you to explore these wonderful online sources for yourself. Check out our Sources page to see where we find the content.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.