Thomas Skaife discovered that smaller lenses and smaller photographs needed smaller exposure times and developed his small "Pistolgraph" camera in 1859. By the end of the year, he claimed that he and his pupils had made some 500 pictures using the hand-held camera with spring-shutters. The tiny "pistolgrams" could best be viewed with a magnifying glass, but it was also possible to make enlargements (an uncommon practice at the time), hundreds of times the size of the original, with sufficient sharpness.