Atelier Bonryu(E)
pinhole photography
Laboratory: Pinhole Photography
History of Pinhole Photography
- Mo Ti and Aristotle -
Mo Ti and Aristotle: What is the oldest written document on the pinhole phenomenon?
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Aristotle described that during a solar eclipse the pinhole phenomenon is observed by the solar light which comes through the overlapping leaves of a plane tree.
In the western countries the oldest record describing the pinhole phenomenon is the one by Aristotle (B.C. 384 -322) written in 4th century B.C., where solar images projected on the ground by the sunlight through the trees during a solar eclipse was described. Though Aristotle described ”plane trees or other broadleaf trees....“, it can be easily imagined that many pinholes produced by overlapping leaves of any broadleaf tree project many images of the solar eclipse on the ground. The above figure shows such a situation. If one would like to look at actual pictures of such a phenomenon one can find a lot of such pictures, for example, in Wikimedia Commons.
When one sees the projected image one finds that the shape of the image seems as the same as that of the object (the sun) regardless of the shape of the hole through which the light comes. This was posed as one of the Aristotle’s problems (*1), which had not been solved in the western countries until Francesco Maurolico (1494 - 1575) and Johannes Kepler (1575 - 1630) solved it during Renaissance.
On the other hand in the Oriental world a written record on the pinhole phenomenon was existing since 5th century B.C., which is one century earlier than the Aristotle’s document. This is Mozi, the text book of the Mohist school lead by Mo Ti (also Mozi, Mo Di: 450? - 390? B.C.), and the pinhole phenomenon is described in 4 pages of Mozi, i.e.,Mo-Jing 1 & 2, Mo-Jing-Shuo 1 & 2 (*2). The existing text, Mozi, is composed of 53 pages and the above 4 pages are devoted to descriptions of logics, science and technology. Actually not only the knowledge of the optics but also other fields of the classical physics are described in these 4 pages. These subject matters have been introduced by Joseph Needham (1900 - 1995) and widely known all over the world in the middle of 20th century.
By the way, Mo-Jing and Mo-Jing-Shuo are extremely difficult to understand because of the highly simplified description with errors in writing which slipped into them during a long time of accession. Though there are such difficulties it is generally accepted that Mo Ti was understanding correctly the pinhole phenomenon up to a certain level. It is interesting enough that Aristotle couldn’t understand the reason why the pinhole image was inverted but Mo Ti seems to have understood the reason correctly by judging from the description in Mo-Jing and Mo-Jing-Shuo. In the western countries this problem remained unsolved until Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, 1452 - 1519) in Renaissance.
