Digital Cinematography, 2nd Edition

Lenses 165

Greeks lled glass spheres with water to make

lenses. Heiroglyphs from the 5th century BC

describe simple glass meniscal lenses. Alhazeni

wrote about lenses in his “Book of Optics” in the

11th century. Between the 11th and 13th century

“reading stones” were used to assist in illumi-

nating religious manuscripts, Roger Bacon used

parts of glass spheres as magnifying glasses.

The telescope and the microscope were both

invented around 1600, although for about 150

years, the achievable image magnication could

not be increased beyond a factor of 10x. Using

the simple glass of that time, it was not possible

to ...