Pill box containing an "air lens focus 1 1/2" ". An air lens is an arrangement of lenses consisting of two lenses with an air gap between them. It is a lens with a refractive index of air and is used in photography.

This box and lens comes from a 15 drawer cabinet found in the Herschel family home in the 1950s. Collectively the contents of this and a similar cabinet seems to suggest that they were used by successive generations of the family to store specimens, material and apparatus for carrying out experiments. This is likely to have been used in some way in optical and/ or photography experiments.