the.com/pinhole camera

means A simple light-tight box with a tiny aperture on one side that lets light rays pass through to form an upside-down image on the opposite wall, where film or photo paper captures it.

from The principle predates the word itself — ancient thinkers including Mozi in China and Aristotle in Greece noticed that light passing through a small hole could project an inverted image, and by the Renaissance this was formalized as the 'camera obscura,' Latin for 'dark room' or 'dark chamber.' That phrase is the direct ancestor of our modern word 'camera' — the device simply shrank the room down to a box, and later, swapped the wall for film. 'Pinhole' just describes the aperture doing the work: no lens, no glass, just a hole small enough to focus light by geometry alone.