Arthur Pillsbury majored in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, beginning in 1894, while running a shop for the newly fashionable bicycles and a photography studio. There, he built the first motorcycle in California and his own cameras, experimenting with every aspect of the rapidly developing technologies. He built some of the first panorama, under water and movie cameras.
Pillsbury's images are works of art. His mission was larger.
Pillsbury' laid the groundwork for the use of photography as we know it today. Seeing is believing. Through his work we first saw a wild flower blooming and a cell divide.
The cameras invented by Arthur C. Pillsbury remain with us. Each was built to extend human understanding.
In 1909 AC filmed the first nature movie, showing it at his studio in Yosemite.
While still in college he considered how to widen the frame of a lens to produce a more expansive image. He solved the problem by designing and building the first circuit panorama camera.
In 1910, realizing that the number of species of wild flowers in the meadow near his studio in Yosemite were decreasing, Pillsbury built the first lapse-timer camera so flowers could speak for themselves. Until then the Park Service was mowing the meadows. The mowing stopped the day he showed the film to federal superintendents meeting there.
On May 17, 1919, Pillsbury took the first aerial photos of Yosemite.
In 1927, in a lab loaned to him by UC Berkeley, Pillsbury build a microscopic motion picture camera. His images stunned the scientists of the day. They had spent their careers studying dead samples under their microscopes. Capturing the reality of microscopic life has created explosive waves of discovery in every field of science.
Pillsbury's motion picture technology caught the attention of leaders from around the world. By 1930 Pillsbury invented the X-ray motion picture and underwater motion picture cameras. The focus of his life's work was connecting you to the worlds we could not see without the extension of human vision made possible through his photographic innovations.
Pillsbury's cameras were not patented. He wanted them to be available to everyone.
The world has used his work lavishly. His earliest educational films, then produced for schools at all levels, were used worldwide. He created new awareness of the natural world. His legacy lives with today in multivariate ways. In every part of our lives photography touches us, changes us, informs, and increases our awareness of our world. Arthur C. Pillsbury was one of the first photographic pioneers beckoning us on with images and insights. But he was more than that as you will discover for yourself as you understand his life's work.
For more on AC Pillsbury visit our history site. Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation