We just had a very enjoyable family day out strolling through the Mayor of London’s Thames Festival 2009: having started with some paella and a set from the remarkably good Petebox near the London Eye, we spent the whole afternoon mooching past countless stalls and live displays along the river towards Tower Bridge.
So far, so not very Cipher Mysteries-esque: but then we ran into Willett & Patteson’s Amazing Portable Camera Obscura. The phrase “Camera Obscura” (literally “darkened room”) was coined by Johannes Kepler to describe rooms using a lens to enhance pinhole projection, yet the concept also forms the backbone of the whole (allegedly much earlier) Hockney-Falco historical thesis. Willett & Patteson’s rotating camera obscura follows a Victorian model dating to around 1850 or so: this allows people inside a tent to pan and tilt a mirror around to project an image of what is happening outside the tent onto a horizontal surface…
Yes, their amazing rotating camera obscura was indeed the very first pan/tilt security camera. (You may not know that my day job is designing and manufacturing PTZ security cameras). Just to show that the best ideas can have a second lease of life 150 years on, here’s European patent EP1166178 (particularly Fig. 3) which is basically an identical optical arrangement for digital PTZ cameras.
However, for me the most stunning historical moment of the day came in Potters Field Park, an open green space directly opposite the Tower of London. OK, to my eyes Tower Bridge is a Victorian monstrosity, with all the finesse of a ten-tier chav wedding cake made of iron. But all the same, sitting in a deckchair in Potters Field Park looking across the Thames to the Tower, I felt all gooey and medieval, as though time itself was pliable. Perhaps that’s the point of appreciating history? Though I loved the festival, it really shouldn’t take a thousand stalls to demonstrate that London really has something for everyone’s taste.