The curious picture above crossed my Tumblr dashboard this morning, with this caption:
Nine-lens camera fully assembled. This camera was designed by Oliver Scott Reading in the early 1930’s. It was the state-of-the-art aerial camera for many years. (1938)
-NOAAI wanted to find out more about it, and a quick Google search turned up this description in a 1936 issue of Popular Mechanics. You can see its size much better in their picture, with a man standing next to it. The camera was used for aerial photography and photogrammetry by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, now part of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. There are thousands of historic photos from the Survey here.
The nine-lens camera was capable of photographing 600 square miles in a single picture. The eight lenses around the edge of the central one were focussed on angled mirrors "of an astronomical type", broadening the area that could be covered. All nine images were projected on a single piece of film, which was held flat by a vacuum pump.
The complex engineering of the nine-lense camera was a great improvement on the five-lens camera that was previously used. It was designed by Captain Oliver Scott Reading of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, a "mechanical genius" who had joined the Survey straight out of high school and subsequently educated himself in this type of work. Read more about his interesting life here (PDF) and in his obituary (PDF). You can learn more about aerial photogrammetry in this very accessible presentation (PDF).
Incidentally, the nine-lens camera was tough. Even after a fatal plane crash onto Mount Moffat, it was able to be reconstructed, as shown below.
Oliver Scott Reading with components of nine-lens camera. Reassembling camera after Mount Moffat crash.
- NOAA
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