Sheldon Hine

Sheldon Hine (January 25, 1907- ) was born in Waterloo, Indiana. He was an inventor in the field of photographic technology.

He decided to go into photography when he was in High School and was eventually hired by Lincoln Life. When World War II started he joined the Navy. His unit was trying to get three-dimensional relief maps of the places they were trying to invade but had a problem with the printing process. Hine and a photochemist met and about 14 days later they had a solution.

The next problem that the group had to tackle was the fact that radar could only get images of the land from above and those images didn’t contain many details. Hine knew that light and radar waves were the same pattern, so he put a tiny bulb with 1 mm worth of filament in to get a better picture. This technology was used to get three-dimensional relief maps for the D-day invasion and for the bomber to drop the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

After the war ended he returned to commercial photography. He set out to fix another problem with taking detailed images. When you have light it helps you take pictures but it also creates shadows which in turn give the image a lower quality. To get rid of the shadows he invented the Hinelight A. He put a source of light in the camera and it had a beam splitter that made the light go back and forth seven times between a piece of glass that was coated black. This filtered out the shadow and left the image extremely detailed. The Hinelight A was so effective that you could take a picture down the barrel of a gun and see the bullet.