Thornton-Pickard Ruby Horizontal Reflex Camera

Single-lens reflex box camera by Thornton-Pickard, with a Carl Zeiss "Tessar" lens.

This is a Thornton-Pickard Ruby Horizontal Reflex camera.

Thornton-Pickard was a camera manufacturer, founded in Manchester 1888 by John Thornton and Edgar Pickard, but based in Altrincham from 1891. The new company’s products, particularly camera shutters, were initially designed by Thornton, who had already been manufacturing photographic equipment under his own name. Despite Edgar Pickard’s death in 1897 and John Thornton’s resignation in 1898, the firm gradually grew to become an important camera manufacturer in the years leading up to the First World War.

This c.1935 Ruby Horizontal Reflex camera was one of Thornton-Pickard’s later cameras, though part of a range of “Ruby Reflex” cameras that the company had produced since around 1908. A single lens reflex camera, which use the same lens for both taking the photograph and the viewfinder, the Ruby Horizontal Reflex was sighted through the folding hood at the top of the camera and featured a retractable bellows lens. Unusually it could be fitted to take photographs using either convenient rolls of film, or on glass plates, for higher quality images.