The history of the development of photography mentions many attempts to obtain an image using light. Back in the day, it was noticed that a sunbeam, going through a small hole in a darkened room, leaves a light pattern shaped like objects of the outside world on the plane. The objects are reflected in their exact proportions and colors but reduced in size and inverted. This property of the dark room, or camera obscura, was known to Aristotle and the Chinese philosopher Mozi.

Mozi’s treatise tells a story about the appearance of an inverted image on the wall of a darkened room:

This is the oldest extant description of a camera obscura, which Mozi scholars dubbed a “treasure chest”.

In the 10th century, the Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham, who was engaged in the study of optical phenomena, used an improvised camera obscura in the form of a darkened tent to observe solar eclipses. Knowing how harmful it was to look at the sun with the naked eye, he made a small hole in the tent’s canopy and studied the image of the sun on the opposite wall of the tent. He was the first to notice that the clarity of an image on the wall depended on the diameter of the hole.

In 1620, the astronomer and optical physicist Johannes Kepler also used a camera obscura to study a solar eclipse. He set up a dark tent in a field, placed a lens in the tent’s slit, and observed the image that appeared on white paper attached to the opposite wall of the tent opposite the lens.