24 highlights
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The first “cameras” were used not to create images but to study optics. The Arab scholar Ibn Al-Haytham (945–1040), also known as Alhazen, is generally credited as being the first person to study how we see. He invented the camera obscura, the precursor to the pinhole camera, to demonstrate how light can be used to project an image onto a flat surface.
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German scientist Johann Heinrich Schulze conducted the first experiments with photo-sensitive chemicals in 1727, proving that silver salts were sensitive to light.
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On a summer day in 1827, French scientist Joseph Nicephore Niepce developed the first photographic image with a camera obscura. Niepce placed an engraving onto a metal plate coated in bitumen and then exposed it to light.
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However, Niepce’s process required eight hours of light exposure to create an image that would soon fade away. The ability to “fix” an image, or make it permanent, came along later.
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In 1839, Daguerre and Niepce’s son sold the rights for the daguerreotype to the French government and published a booklet describing the process. The daguerreotype gained popularity quickly in Europe and the U.S.
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The drawback to daguerreotypes is that they cannot be reproduced; each one is a unique image. The ability to create multiple prints came about thanks to the work of Henry Fox Talbot, an English botanist, mathematician and a contemporary of Daguerre.
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Talbot sensitized paper to light using a silver-salt solution. He then exposed the paper to light. The background became black, and the subject was rendered in gradations of gray. This was a negative image. From the paper negative, Talbot made contact prints, reversing the light and shadows to create a detailed picture.
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In 1851, Frederick Scoff Archer, an English sculptor, invented the wet-plate negative. Using a viscous solution of collodion (a volatile, alcohol-based chemical), he coated glass with light-sensitive silver salts. Because it was glass and not paper, this wet plate created a more stable and detailed negative.
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Photography was not for the faint of heart or those who traveled lightly. That changed in 1879 with the introduction of the dry plate. Like wet-plate photography, this process used a glass negative plate to capture an image. Unlike the wet-plate process, dry plates were coated with a dried gelatin emulsion, meaning they could be stored for a period of time. Photographers no longer needed portable darkrooms and could now hire technicians to develop their photographs, days or months after the images had been shot.
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In 1889, photographer and industrialist George Eastman invented film with a base that was flexible, unbreakable, and could be rolled. Emulsions coated on a cellulose nitrate film base, such as Eastman’s, made the mass-produced box camera a reality.
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The 35 mm film most people know today was invented by Kodak in 1913 for the early motion picture industry. In the mid-1920s, the German camera maker Leica used this technology to create the first still camera that used the 35 mm format.
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The drawback to nitrate-based film was that it was flammable and tended to decay over time. Kodak and other manufacturers began switching to a celluloid base, which was fireproof and more durable, in the 1920s. Triacetate film came later and was more stable and flexible, as well as fireproof.
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Prints on this fiber-based paper coated with a gelatin emulsion are quite stable when properly processed. Their stability is enhanced if the print is toned with either sepia (brown tone) or selenium (light, silvery tone).
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The paper will dry out and crack under poor archival conditions. Loss of the image can also be due to high humidity, but the real enemy of paper is chemical residue left by the photographic fixer, a chemical solution cued to remove grain from films and prints during processing.
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The next innovation in photographic papers was resin-coating or water-resistant paper. The idea was to use normal linen fiber-base paper and coat it with a plastic (polyethylene) material, making the paper water-resistant.
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The problem with resin-coated papers was that the image rides on the plastic coating and was susceptible to fading.
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Kodachrome, dating to the first third of the 20th century, was the first color film to produce prints that could last half a century. Now, new techniques are creating permanent color prints that last 200 years or more.
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Instant photography was invented by Edwin Herbert Land, an American inventor and physicist. Land was already known for his pioneering use of light-sensitive polymers in eyeglasses to invent polarized lenses. In 1948, he unveiled his first instant-film camera, the Land Camera 95.
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Polaroid remained the dominant brand, but with the advent of digital photography in the 1990s, it began to decline. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and stopped making instant film in 2008.
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A laterally reversed image would be obtained unless the camera was fitted with a mirror or prism to correct this effect. When the sensitized plate was placed in the camera, the lens cap would be removed to start the exposure.
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As the Eastman Kodak Company promised in ads from that period, “You press the button, we’ll do the rest.”
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The roots of digital photography, which would revolutionize the industry, began with the development of the first charged-coupled device at Bell Labs in 1969. The CCD converts light to an electronic signal and remains the heart of digital devices today.
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Samsung introduced the first smartphone camera—the SCH-V200—in 2000.
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“Blitzlichtpulver” or flashlight powder was invented in Germany in 1887 by Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke. Lycopodium powder (the waxy spores from club moss) was used in early flash powder.