This is a daguerreotype camera from around 1840 on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This is a relatively small model, and the process of producing an image using this camera would have required long exposure times, and a delicate, painstaking process that included copper, silver, mercury--in other words, pretty toxic stuff. I took this with my phone, which I whipped out of my pocket and clicked, before moving on to the next exhibition.
Looks like a modern surveillance camera.
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