Today, when you snap a picture and have it developed so easily, it’s hard to believe that hundreds of years of experimenting were needed before this became possible. Photography was not invented by any single person. Just to give you an idea of what went into bringing it to its present stage of perfection, here is a quick outline of the history of photography. Between the 11th and 16th centuries, man had “the camera obscura.” This enabled him to show on paper an image which could be traced by hand to give accurate drawings of natural scenes. It didn’t really “take” a picture. In 1568, Daniello Barbaro fitted the camera obscura with a lens and a changeable opening to sharpen the image. In 1802, Thomas Wedgwood and Sir Humphrey Davy recorded silhouettes and images of paintings on coated paper by contact printing, but they couldn’t make the prints permanent. In 1816, Joseph Niepce made a crude photographic camera from a jewel box and a lens taken from a microscope.
| He was able to make a negative image. In 1835, William Talbot was the first to make positives from negatives, the first to make permanent images. In 1839, Louis Daguerre announced the daguerreotype process, which recorded the image on a silver plate. More and more developments were contributed by individuals all over the world as time went on. Many of them are too technical to discuss here, but as you can see, it was a long slow process of growth. Finally, in 1888, a box camera was put on the market, developed by the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company, using the Kodak system. The camera was sold already loaded with enough film for 100 exposures. The pictures were 6 centimeters wide. After exposure, camera and film were returned to Rochester, where the film was removed and processed and the camera reloaded and returned to the customer. This box camera was probably the beginning of popular photography as we know it today when billions of pictures are taken every year by people all over the world. | ||
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