Ignazio Porro (25 November 1801 – 8 October 1875) was an Italian inventor of

optical instruments An optical instrument (or "optic" for short) is a device that processes light waves (or photons), either to enhance an image for viewing or to analyze and determine their characteristic properties. Common examples include periscopes, microscopes ...

. Porro's name is most closely associated with the prism system which he invented around 1850 and which is used in the construction of

Porro prism In optics, a Porro prism, named for its inventor Ignazio Porro, is a type of ''reflection prism'' used in optical instruments to alter the orientation of an image. Description It consists of a block of material shaped like a right geometric ...

binoculars Binoculars or field glasses are two refracting telescopes mounted side-by-side and aligned to point in the same direction, allowing the viewer to use both eyes (binocular vision) when viewing distant objects. Most binoculars are sized to be held ...

. He also developed a

strip camera Strip photography, or slit photography, is a photographic technique of capturing a two-dimensional image as a sequence of one-dimensional images over time, in contrast to a normal photo which is a single two-dimensional image (the full field) at ...

in 1853 for mapping, which was one of the earliest such.How strip-photography complicated the interpretation of the still photographic image
", Maarten Vanvolsem

References

Works

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External links

at the FSU Molecular Expressions website
Information about Porro at the Carl Zeiss website
1801 births 1875 deaths 19th-century Italian inventors Lens designers Optical engineers Italian topographers {{Italy-engineer-stub