Archimedes’ Burning Glasses are the only real ancient optical instruments about which we have a contemporary or nearly contemporary record. These early water-filled glasses were the first projection lenses. Archimedes’ Burning Glasses played an important part in the developments which led to the modern motion picture because, without lenses for the projection, films would be nothing but peep-shows, visible to one person at a time. Without lenses our cameras would be very crude instruments. In a true sense the focused mirror or lens burning glass is the foundation of every kind of camera and all projection work. Aristotle and Archimedes and other Greek scientists, including Euclid, who is credited with being the first to demonstrate that light travels in straight lines, opened the book of knowledge of the light and shadow art. Ptolemy who flourished at Alexandria around 130 A.D. was the greatest scientist of his era and his influence was powerful for fifteen centuries. It was he who developed the Ptolemaic theory which viewed the earth as the center of the universe, with the sun and other bodies revolving around it. That theory very naturally tended to increase man’s idea of his own importance. Ptolemy was a geographer and mathematician as well as an astronomer. His great work was called _Almagest_ by the Arabs. Ptolemy discussed the persistence of vision, the laws of reflection and made studies of refraction. The poor tools then available and inaccurate understanding of some basic principles prevented in ancient days the discovery of devices capable of capturing the illusion of motion. History played its part, too. After the stimulus given to all knowledge by the Greeks, little interest in the arts and sciences was taken anywhere for a long time. Then in the 9th century the scholarship of Greece was advanced by the Arabs, from whom Europe began to receive it in the 12th century. During the early Middle Ages, the real “Dark Ages” when barbarian hordes overran much of Europe, the seat of learning was in the Near East, in Arabia and Persia. Today it may be difficult for some to attribute great intellectual advance to a people often associated in the common mind with desert life and the crudities of camel transport. But around the year 850 A.D. the most elaborate courts of the world, and keenest scholarship, were in the Near East. The latest of the ancient pioneers in magic shadows, the fourth “A”, was Alhazen, the Arab. Alhazen (Abu Ali Alhasan Ibn Alhasan, Ibnu-l-Haitam or Ibn Al-Haitan) was the greatest Arab scientist in the field of optics and vision. Born in 965 at Basra, Arabian center of commerce and learning, near the Persian Gulf, Alhazen from an early age devoted himself to science of a practical rather than theoretical nature. He was what would be called a civil engineer in our day.