During photography's early decades, enlargements were difficult and expensive to make and often turned out hopelessly blurred. If you wanted big pictures you used a big camera. Many photographers had cameras that took 11 x 14-inch plates and larger and larger ones were built as the demand for big pictures grew. Among the first true giants was the one designed in 1858 by C. Thurston Thompson, an English photographer who specialized in reproducing works of art; his camera, a full 12 feet long, took photographs three feet square.
The largest camera of them all was built in the United States around 1900. Named the Mammoth, it was designed for officials of the Chicago and Alton Railroad Company, who wished to have a single, perfectly detailed portrait of their newest luxury train. Having accomplished this feat, the Mammoth, like its prehistoric namesake, vanished, a victim of its own size and clumsiness.
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| The Mammoth |
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| Butterfield Camera 1929 |
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Weighing a full 1,400 pounds when loaded with its 500-pound glass plate, the Mammoth was operated by a team of sometimes as many as 15 men. Built in Chicago, it was moved about on a specially designed railroad car; the developing and printing of one of its 4,5 x 8-foot photographs required 10 gallons of chemical solutions. The picture it was designed to take, of a luxury express train, so overwhelmed the judges at the 1900 Paris Exposition by its sheer size that it won the "Grand Prize of the World." |
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