A machine imagined so that a man would never have to show his face, which became the camera, of the whole twentieth century, that taught photographers to show theirs.

The founding legend starts in the mud of the First World War, with a trench periscope: a tube and two mirrors that let you see without being seen. A German engineer named Reinhold Heidecke looked at that principle and thought: that should be a camera. His employer said no, so after the war he built it himself, and at the end of 1928 the world met the Rolleiflex. Today, for the first time on this show, not a photographer's story, a camera's story. (And yes, I can hear Eve Arnold objecting from two episodes ago. She's right, forever: no box ever made anyone an artist. But some tools change the person holding them, and this odd little box is the clearest example I know.) ...