At a 2017 auction in the UK, a rare Chambre Automatique that had been purchased for 60 pounds ($81) at an antiques fair sold for 20,000 pounds ($27,156). The seller was Paul Laidlaw, one of the Antiques Roadshow experts. Laidlaw told a reporter, “Everyone’s looking for the Ming vase amongst the dreary Victorian Willow pattern dinnerware, or the Stradivarius amongst the old ex-school violins. In this instance, I identified what had been clearly overlooked by all who’d come before me. At the time I suggested it was an extremely early sub-miniature camera of circa 1861. What I didn’t realise is that it’s considered the first sub-miniature camera.”

After doing some research, Laidlaw said, “I immediately realised I’d bought something spectacularly rare, however, I couldn’t find records of any examples having been sold. I kid you not, I didn’t know whether it would sell for £2000 or £100,000 — and neither did the auctioneer — though I considered either to be possible” (source; auction video).

Auguste Adolphe Bertsch was a pioneer photographer and an early exponent of microphotography. He was (probably) born in 1813 and was killed during the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. In 1860, Bertsch introduced the Chambre Automatique to the Société Française de Photographie. The instrument, basically a four-inch brass cube, used wet-collodion plates to produce 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 inch images. A miniature version, also constructed of brass, was exhibited the following year. The George Eastman Museum holds 11 items designed by Bertsch in its collection, including a miniature kit similar to the one Laidlaw bought (see here).

Chambre Automatique is French for “automatic camera.” According to A Century of Cameras, it was “so named because of its fixed focus lens. That is, as the lens could not be adjusted to focus on objects at various distances, it was in a sense ‘automatic,’ all objects beyond a certain distance being in sharp focus” (Eaton S. Lothrop, Jr., A Century of Cameras: From the Collection of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, 1973).

Writing about the larger version, Lothrop says, “The camera came, with all the necessary equipment and chemicals for sensitizing and developing, in a wooden case” that was nested into a larger outer case which “had a hinged top which, when opened, revealed an orange glass window.” By attaching a light-tight sleeve, the case would become a miniature “darkroom.”

Lothrop further notes that “sensitizing of the plate was done in the [outer] case and the plate then directly loaded into the wooden plate holder which was permanently attached to the rear of the camera. All of the manipulation related to development could also be performed in the outer carrying case.”

More about the Chambre Automatique de Bertsch can be found here:
https://tinyurl.com/32zjjbpp