In an age of cumbersome large photographical apparatus, the race was on in the mid-19th century to produce practical small, easily portable cameras.
In 1861 Auguste Adolphe Bertsch (1813-71) invented the first subminiature camera called the Chambre Automatique de Bertsch. It featured a fixed focus lens with a view of less than 1in in diameter and so used a very small 1½in (4cm) wet collodion plate. It was a camera along the lines of the modern method of a miniature camera producing negatives for enlargement.