#Exhibit of the Month

The main parts of the camera include the body, bellows, lens, and viewfinder system. The body consists of two lacquered walnut wood frames, joined by a folding black textile bellows that allows the necessary extension for focusing. On the front panel is the Agfa anastigmat lens, mounted in a Compur-type shutter produced by F. Deckel in Munich. It features a foldable "brilliant" viewfinder for both portrait and landscape orientation. It uses glass photographic plates coated with a photographic emulsion, mounted in walnut wood holders, with a frame size of 9x12 cm.
The walnut wood model, considered the flagship "Agfa Isolar Luxus," was designed by the A.H. Rietzschel factory in Munich, acquired by AGFA in 1925, which continued producing this type of camera under its own name until the late 1920s.
The piece was restored by Mihail Culașco, Restoration Department of NMHM.
Brief History of the Camera
The history of the camera spans 200 years, evolving from the camera obscura to today's digital devices. Key milestones include: the first permanent photograph in 1826 by French physicist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, using a wooden box and a plate coated with bitumen of Judea; the invention of the first photographic process - daguerreotype - in 1839 by Frenchman Louis Daguerre, marking the official birth of photography; the invention of calotype, based on the negative/positive principle, by British physicist and chemist Fox Talbot; the invention of wet collodion plates by Englishman Frederick Scott Archer and dry glass plates by Richard Leach Maddox and John Huds Bennet; the introduction of flexible roll film and the launch of the first Kodak camera by American inventor George Eastman; the release of the first 35 mm film camera by German company "Leica"; the launch of the first instant camera "Polaroid," invented by American Edwin Land. Finally, starting in 1975, this path led to the digital photography revolution. Each successive step made cameras smaller and faster, significantly improving image quality.
The first photographic studio in Chișinău was opened in 1854 by Eduard Glewski, and before World War I, there were already about 100 photography studios in Bessarabia.
The collection of the National Museum of History of Moldova includes over 30 cameras, made in Austria, Germany, France, USSR, Japan, and China, dating from the late 19th century to the 2000s. Among them are folding bellows cameras, BOX-type cameras, single-lens reflex (SLR) and twin-lens reflex (TLR) cameras, as well as digital (DSLR) cameras.

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Exhibitions

“Enigma. Victory of decrypting”

June 14 - 30, 2021

Thanks to the efforts of brilliant Polish mathematicians, the complex cipher of the Enigma, the German cipher machine, was broken. This influenced the course of World War II. More than seventy years after its completion, the Polish Institute and the Wielkopolska Voivodeship Council invite you from 14 to 30 June 2021 to the National Museum of History of Moldova to visit the exhibition entitled "Enigma. The victory of decrypting".

The German Enigma cipher machine was made by Arthur Scherbius. He achieved commercial success in the civilian market, as well as in state and administrative institutions long before the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945). As early as 1932, Polish cryptologists managed to decipher the extremely complex Enigma codes for the first time. This took place at the Saxon Palace in Warsaw, which housed the headquarters of the Cipher Bureau of the 2nd Division of the Polish Army General Staff.

The parents of the success were the Polish mathematicians-cryptologists: Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski. Their achievements have allowed the decoding of the Enigma ciphers, which were constantly being improved.

Five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, on July 25, 1939, the heads of the Polish Cipher Bureau and the mathematicians-cryptologists revealed the Polish achievements to the French and British secret services. After the outbreak of the war, decryption continued in Great Britain and France, with the participation of Polish scientists. This part of the story is known, however, from movies and books.

The exhibition, prepared by the Wielkopolska Voivodeship Council and, in the Romanian version, by the Polish Institute in Bucharest, acquaints us with the history of lesser-known Polish heroes-cryptologists, their teachers and collaborators, whose knowledge and mathematical genius allowed them to reveal one of the best kept secrets of the Third Reich.

Observing the development of the contemporary knowledge-based economy, we often forget that, in many areas, its roots spring from the trenches of the great wars of the 20th century.

The exhibition can be seen on the fence of the National Museum of History of Moldova (31 August 1989 Street, no. 121A) from 14 to 30 June 2021.

The fascinating history of this achievement can be read in the article about the Enigma in the monthly magazine "Historia" (text in Romanian).