The point I was making is not that it had to be photochemical, but that a recording has to be made for the device to be a camera.
The dictionary is very clear on this:
The first way we discovered to record a visual image was with photo-sensitive chemicals, which were placed in the focal plane of a small camera obscura.
Today, only a tiny fraction of the images recorded each day by cameras rely on photosensitive chemicals - now its all about solid state devices which transform photons of light into electrons. That is how our digital cameras work.
The etymology of the word photography also puts recoding front and centre - when you break it into it's component parts and translate to English, you get someting like "writting with light".
The camera is named after the camera obscura, but the camera obscura is not a camera.
BTW - if anyone wants to learn about the history of photography from an expert teacher, I can highly recommend the History of Photography podcast by professor and photogapher Jeff Curto (
http://anon.projectarchive.net/?http://photohistory.jeffcurto.com).
B.
For some reason you don't think I know what I'm talking about, but I can assure you that I do - and, on the other hand, I didn't really think you were putting cameras in the heaven of Platonic ideas...
The camera (obscura, lucida, optica - whatever...) was and is an
optical device, invented many centuries before the invention of what we call photography, and yes - wham bam thank you, ma'am - I know very well the meaning of the composite greek word photography (from: phos, light and graphein, which can mean both writing and painting or drawing).
I also know the historical-intellectual context when the word was coined: as far as we know it was first coined in french -
photographie - by the French-Brazilian inventor Hercules Florance no later than 1834, that is at least 4 years before sir John Herschel coined english
photography in 1839.
The intellectual context for the coinage of this word was the Romantic philosophy of Nature, and this new fresh word very well mirror what contemporary intellectuals found so fascinating about it all - a totally new kind of image made not by human hand, a painting or drawing made by the natural sunlight...
So what fascinated Harcules Florance, John Herschel, William Fox Talbot and so many other wasn't the very well know camera obscura, it was the photography as such. (Well, Fox Talbot had his own name for the process; he called it "calotypie", but he understood the calotype as a drawing made by the sunlight, just like Herschel's photography.)
But of course Florance, Herschel, Fox Talbot, Niépce, Daguerre and other pioneers weren't more stubborn and stupid than they understood, that a well known type of optic-artistic instrument - the camera obscura - could be used in a new way: the camera obscura could be made into a - photographic camera!
I'll give you two pictures to show you this transition: the first is the very first ever heliographic engraving, made in 1825 by Nicéphore Niepce, the second is the first photographic image made with a camera in 1826 or 1827, and the camera in question was the only historically possible camera, i.e. a camera obscura.
The basic problem for inventing photography had nothing to do with the camera. The problem was to make PERMANENT pictures using some kind of photographic process, and the picture above which is the very first photo image ever made is what Niepce gave the name heliographic engraving.
But a bit later - in 1826 or 1827 - having mastered the basic permanence problem he started putting the sensitized photographic material inside a camera obscura, and the result was "Wiew from the window at Le Gras", the first of all photos made by a camera:
Let's end with a few words about words, dictionaries and history!
An ordinary dictionary of the English language is an instrument to inform about the more usual contemporary uses of a word or a cluster of words, but the dictionary can't decide what's the correct use, if there is some kind of correct use at all. However, it's pretty useless as an instrument for historical research. To that end you have to have a historical dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary and its "relatives" in other languages.
About the word camera: well, it's good old latin meaning "chamber" or "room" (just like "penis" means tail...), and the word as such has nothing to do with neither optical devices, nor capturing images.
But I guess that Caesar, Cicero and Augustus had no idea what camera meant...