They made underwater cameras disposable long before any other kind of camera was made to be chucked away. Why? Because cameras aren’t meant to go underwater. They break. Film doesn’t like getting wet; shutters are full of leaky bits; and the bit where the film goes in wasn’t really meant to resist liquid.
All of which meant that unless you were David Bailey, you couldn’t afford to shoot underwater, so you didn’t. Every time you went snorkelling abroad you wished you could, but you couldn’t. Until, in a stroke of genius comparable to the one the guy who invented Polaroids had, they made underwater cameras disposable.
Let’s make cameras that let you see what you took instantly, said the guy that made Polaroids. Let’s let people take pictures underwater, said the chap who made underwater cameras disposable. If we make underwater cameras disposable, he reasoned, it doesn’t matter if they break. If we make underwater cameras disposable we can seal them completely – and then they shouldn’t break.
Here’s how. When you make underwater cameras disposable, you don’t need to get the film in or out. The camera is built with the film inside, so it’s already loaded – and because it’s made for one use only, the film can be cracked out at the developer’s. So – no need to load or remove film, no cracks in the casing. No cracks in the casing – no water.
The rationale for making underwater cameras disposable was as simple and brilliant as that. It worked, too, up to a point – you could take ‘em underwater, point them at stuff and press the shutter button, and sometimes you’d get back a hazy picture of something that looked like a fish. Most of the time, though, you’d just get a sort of blue nothing. Tiny lenses and minute viewfinders aren’t the ideal kit for taking pictures in water (which is usually full of particulate matter of some kind, whether it’s chlorine and wee or salt and plankton). Making underwater cameras disposable was an excellent idea – in practice, though, there’s not so much difference between a picture taken by a disposable underwater camera and one you just broke by dropping it in the sea.
