A photography enthusiast is battling to re-write the history books after a three-year project left him convinced that a famous 16th-century engraving is the 'world's first photograph'. Welshman Roger Davies also claims to have uncovered a secret code in the artwork, leading him to conclude that the 1514 engraving is a photograph of a previously un-attributed drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. Davies came up with his intriguing theory after scrutinising Melancholia, a famous engraving by renowned German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. The former contractor for the Atomic Weapons Establishment - whose job gave him experience in optics - claims that the 9in high Dürer masterpiece was no such thing. Rather a photograph of a much larger Da Vinci drawing - perhaps eight feet tall - exposed and then fixed onto a 'light-sensitive' copper plate, placed inside a camera obscura.
Ed ~ The secret code that Mr Davies has discovered is imaginative rubbish created with bogus science; the speculation on the use of camera obscuras and photographic techniques in 1514 is plausible but technically unlikely.