Box for Thornton-Pickard Shutter

An empty box for a Thornton-Pickard "Time & Inst." camera shutter, with instruction leaflet on the reverse side of the lid.

This is the box for a Thornton-Pickard roller camera shutter.

Early cameras took so long to take photographs that they had no need for a shutter to uncover the camera lens and close it again. Instead, the photographer simply removed the camera’s lens cap by hand, counted the time, then replaced the cap when they thought the photographic plate had been exposed to enough light to make an image. Taking images that were neither too bright nor too dark was a matter of skill, and the long exposure times meant it was difficult to take images of moving objects without them blurring.

In the later 19th century, the development of more sensitive photographic chemicals meant that photographic plates only needed to be exposed to light for a fraction of a second to take a photograph, but some sort of mechanical shutter was needed to quickly open and shut the camera lens.

This particular shutter box was manufactured by Thornton-Pickard, a company established in Manchester by John Thornton and Edgar Pickard in 1888. John Thornton first patented his design for a roller blind shutter in 1886 and they became quite popular, with Thornton-Pickard claiming to have sold 12,000 of them in the first few years of production. Shutters were an important part of Thornton-Pickard’s business at first, but the company gradually focussed their efforts on producing cameras, until its demise in 1939.