Ibn al Haytham, Son of Iraq, Maker of the Very First Camera

posted on: Oct 6, 2021

By: Ruqyah Sweidan / Arab America Contributing Writer

Born in Basra, Iraq, around the year 965, Al-Hasan Ibn al Haytham was a pioneer and scientific thinker. He thoroughly studied and produced work in Math, Physics, Geometry and Astronomy. Although his most famous breakthroughs were in understanding light and vision. He set new standards in experimental science and made contributions that heavily influenced the European Renaissance.

Ibn al Haytham’s Breakthrough

In Basra, the local library included over 15,000 books, many of which were ancient works that were translated into Arabic. In the early eleventh century, Ibn al Haytham was invited to Egypt to help build a dam on the Nile. After he successfully designed a dam and reservoir, Ibn al Haythem immediately focused his attention on understanding light and vision. It is said that while sitting in a dark room, he noticed a bright light on the wall. Upon closer inspection, he realized that this light was an image of objects outside his room. This led to Ibn al Haytham’s landmark discovery: light bounces off the objects outside travels through the hole in the wall of a room and makes an image

Ibn al Haytham built his own darkroom, which later came to be known as camera obscura. He studied the movement of light and experimented with lenses and mirrors. He tested reflection and refraction and concluded that light refracts when it moved through different materials.

Ibn al Haytham’s Influence

Throughout his studies, Ibn al Haytham kept detailed accounts. He wrote at least 96 books. His most famous is the Book of Optics or Kitab al-Manazir, which was translated into Latin and became very influential. He introduced numerous ideas about light and vision. For instance, he recorded the time consumed when the hole is covered and uncovered. He described that light travels in straight lines. Another revealing experiment introduced the camera obscura in studies of the half-moon shape of the sun’s image during eclipses. He observed this phenomenon on the wall opposite a small hole made in the window shutters of his workshop. This experiment is famously documented in the essay, ‘On the form of the Eclipse’ (Maqalah-fi-Surat-al-Kosuf).

He then compared this phenomenon with that of the human eye: the darkroom was like an eye and that is how people see.  Ibn al-Haytham thus continued researching how our eyes worked. He studied the eye and named important parts of the eye, like the cornea. He also famously corrected predecessor scholars who believed that light originates from the eye. According to Ibn al Haytham, the retina is the center of vision. The impressions that it receives are transferred to the brain by the optical nerve. Afterward, the brain creates a visual image in the symmetrical relationship for both retinas.

Ibn al Haytham Through the Ages

Ibn al-Haytham lived during a golden age of Islamic discovery and creativity from southern Spain to China. Men and women of different faiths and cultures achieved breakthroughs that still influence our world today. By the time he died in 1039, Ibn al-Haytham had left behind valuable knowledge to the engineers and artists of the Renaissance and beyond. In the 13th-century, English philosopher Roger Bacon secured the use of a camera obscura for safe observation of solar eclipses. Two centuries later, Leonardo da Vinci described camera obscura in his Codex Atlanticus.

Today, Ibn al Haytham is honored in many ways. In 2015, UNESCO commemorated him as the “Father of Optics”. Moreover, 1001 Inventions and the World of Ibn al-Haytham is a mixed animation and live-action film that tells the story of Ibn al-Haytham. It is a great short film for the youngsters!

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