Old camera bought for £60 sells for £20k on TV antiques show

A camera bought from a Kent second-hand shop for £60 has sold for a staggering £20,000 on BBC’s Antiques Road Trip.

The antique piece dates from 1861. It is housed in a mahogany case fitted for and containing its original photographic plate viewer and reagent bottles. It was bought by antiques expert Paul Laidlaw and the item fetched 300 times what he paid for it.

He snapped it up after spotting it at RG Scotts Furniture Mart in Margate.

The huge significance of the find became clear when camera experts confi rmed that Paul had discovered a Chambre Automatique De Bertsch, an instrument recognised as the world’s first sub-miniature camera, invented by Paris photographer, inventor and optician Auguste Adolphe Bertsch.

At the final stop of the road trip, Paul put the camera up for auction at Lacy, Scott & Knight Auctioneers in Bury St Edmunds, causing a flurry of excitement with phone bidders from around the world competing with bids in the room and online, and the auctioneer calling for bids in thousand pound increments.

The camera finally sold for £20,000 to a private collector in Switzerland, making an incredible £19,940 profit and even smashing the auctionhouse record.

The profits have been donated to Children in Need.

Speaking about the find Mr Laidlaw said: “In truth it was such a strange beast I can see why others had probably dismissed it as either part of something else, or just some odd piece of laboratory apparatus.

“I didn’t know whether it would sell for £2,000 or £100,000 –and neither did the auctioneer – though I considered either to be possible.”

Antiques Road Trip is on BBC 1 and the episode aired on Friday.