Long before the words ‘interactive’ or ‘environment’ entered the general lexicon, there was the Taxirium at Redbourne House, Salfords, the seat of Sir John Campbell-Headley (1809–1879).

From taxídi, the Greek word for ‘travel,’ the Taxirium was a vast salon designed to recreate the experience of Campbell-Headley’s Third Nile expedition. Its bowed ceiling, painted with an iridescent pigment and lit by carbon-arc lamps, was said to convincingly portray the quality of the Egyptian sky from daybreak to dusk. To alter the quality of the light admitted through three sets of French doors, the grounds at Redbourne were utterly transformed by a twenty-year landscaping project. Most famously, the Taxirium was bisected by an indoor canal, twelve feet wide and four feet deep, hydraulically controlled by a system of gates and sluices. (One story, perhaps apocryphal, holds that Campbell-Headley domesticated a scourge of mosquitoes for the room.) When Redbourne House was opened to the public in 1922, it affected no visitor more profoundly than the young Antony Furtwangler-Long.

Where Campbell-Headley had been a lifelong adventurer, Long’s taste for travel came later in life, with his wartime posting to Burma as part of the Number 45 Squadron of the Royal Air Force. Deeply moved by his time in Asia, Long returned from the war with the idea to create a camera that could more fully record the total essence of a place. In addition to the image framed by the viewfinder, Long’s devices would in separate frames simultaneously capture the sky, the ambient light, the length of shadows, the full quality of the atmosphere. His invention, named the Taxiscope in honor of the famous salon, was deemed too elaborate and marginal a product for the likes of Eastman Kodak or Hasselblad. But after the Cold War, it was revealed that Long’s plans had made their way to Zeiss, then operating in the Soviet occupation zone as Kombinat veb Zeiss Jena, which developed eight prototypes in miniature, presumably for espionage.

Published January 10, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.