Brownie (camera)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brownie was the name of a long-running and extremely popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900,[1] was a very basic cardboard box camera with a simple meniscus lens that took 2¼-inch square pictures on 117 rollfilm. With its simple controls and initial price of $1 USD, it was intended to be a camera that anyone could afford and use. The camera was named after Frank Brownell, its inventor who was a subcontractor of Eastman Kodak, and then ascribed to Palmer Cox's popular cartoon characters.
One of the most popular Brownie models was the Brownie 127, millions of which were sold between 1952 and 1967. The Brownie 127 was a simple bakelite camera for 127 film which featured a simple meniscus lens and a curved film plane to reduce the impact of deficiencies in the lens.
Having written an article in the 1940s for amateur photographers suggesting an expensive camera was unnecessary for quality photography, the famous Picture Post photographer Bert Hardy used a Brownie to stage a carefully posed snapshot of two young women sitting on railings above a breezy Blackpool promenade.[2]
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[edit] External links
- U.S. Patent 725,034 Kodak Brownie, patented by Frank Brownell, filed July 1900
