Origins

If we look back in history, man has tried to capture the world that surrounds him, through art, music, and writing. The Greek philosopher Aristotle understood the principle of the pinhole camera, that light travel in straight lines and was able to view the image of partial eclipse on he ground through holes in a sieve and the gaps between leaves of a plane tree. Later the outside world was brought inside by the use of a camera obscura. A dark room with a small hole allowing light to enter and to project an image of the outside world. 

 Camera obscura, from a manuscript of military designs. Seventeenth century, possibly Italian

In Edinburgh in the 1850’s Maria Theresa Short a member of a family of scientific instrument makers, bought a tenement which had once been the town house of old Laird of Cockpen. She installed a camera obscura giving a 360 degrees view of the city. She called it, Shorts Observatory and Museum of Science and Art. It is still in existence today some 160 years later, still working with some modifications, but retaining many of it original characteristics.

Edinburghs Camera Obscura.

With the invention of Photography around the late1830’s a permanent way was found to preserve the fleeting images seen in the Camera Obscura. Early photographers tried to reproduce the world around them. While most would concentrate on portrait photography in 1848 Newport Kentucky, U.S.A. Charles Fontaye and William S Porter, photographed on eight separate daguerreotype plates a panoramic view of Cincinnati.

Cincinnati Panorma 1848

 

Daguerreotypes are a silvered copper plate which retains the original and only image. Though the clarity is fantastic the image is usually reversed and not easily copied.

So a panoramic made from these plates can only by laid side by side and not over lapped to give a continuous unbroken image.

In England around the same time William Fox Talbot invented a system using paper negatives and paper prints. A forerunner of the system we use today Film negatives and paper prints. In a predigital era a panorama could be photographed, printed on to paper cut and joined together and mounted on a board and displayed as a single continuous image.