Nothing new under the sun...

…with Mapillary and OpenStreetCam :smiley: :

I already knew many inventions pre-date what the average citizen including myself think is the invention date by at least 50 to 100 years. You think the vacuumcleaner was invented in the 1950’s or so? Wrong: depending on your baseline (electric or not), you may go back as far as 1860… (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_cleaner). What people remember is usually the period when something becomes main-stream and available to the average household or citizen, not the invention’s or early commercialization date.

Now for Mapillary and OpenStreetCam… :stuck_out_tongue: The picture depicts a bicycle with a plate camera. Plate cameras of course already date from the earliest days of photography, putting an earliest date for this picuture to the 1830’s. Of course, they hadn’t bicycles like that this early, and the design of the frontal bicycle lamp, which I initially mistook for a possible carbide lamp from the 1895-1940’s, seems much more likely to be an older oil/paraffine lamp considering the details of the lamp design, which don’t fit a carbide one. See this video of such an oil lamp:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lguM7J9IPCU

So that puts this picture probably somewhere at the end of the 19th century, likely the last decade.

Mapillary and OpenStreetCam: eat your heart out, here comes the “Webers photographischer fahrrad” :laughing: : 1 picture per 10km!!