If you are manufacturing something, you have to test it. It wouldn’t do, for example, for your car to say it was going 60 MPH when it was really going 90 MPH. But if you were making a classic Leica camera back in the early 20th century, how do you measure a shutter that operates at 1/1000 of a second — a millisecond — without modern electronics? The answer is a special stroboscope that would look at home in any cyberpunk novel. [SmarterEveryDay] visited a camera restoration operation in Finland, and you can see the machine in action in the video below.
The machine has a wheel that rotates at a fixed speed. By imaging a pattern through the camera, you can determine the shutter speed. The video shows a high-speed video of the shutter operation which is worth watching, and it also explains exactly how the rotating disk combined with the rotating shutter allows the measurement.
The marks on the spinning drum move at a precise speed adjusted by a stroboscope. The rolling shutter on the camera shows each horizontal bar as a diagonal line and the exact pattern will show the precise speed. The lines are a bit curved due to the characteristic of the shutter spring.
Honestly, this is one of those things that is probably of zero practical value today. But we never fail to marvel at the ingenuity of engineers who didn’t have access to modern technology. Or materials, for that matter.
Thanks to [zit] for the tip!
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