Given all the recent hype about wooden electronics, I would like to bring up some of the gorgeous examples from the George Eastman House collection, which is available on their website and partly on Flickr. Some jewels of the collection include the earliest cameras and videocameras, including this original Lumiere Brothers video camera (called Cinematographe) from 1895-1910 produced in the hundreds. Long before wood became a trendy enclosure material for reasons of sustainability, it was a material of choice for its lightness, strength, and ease of workmanship. Imagine a how differently a mass production wood shop must smell than a plastics factory. This ‘Dubroni Apparatus’ from 1864 was the iPod of its day – could it ever be ours?
