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Jan 1, 1500
Invention Of Camera
Invention of a camera - the camera obscura.
The inventor is unknown but Leonardo Da Vinci described the apparatus. Camera Obscura means "dark chamber". It was a darkened box with a tiny hole in one wall that let in the light. The light formed an image on the opposite wall and was upside down.
Artists used this as an aid to help them sketch the image by tracing the prjected images lines and shapes. -
Johann Heinrich Schulze
Johann Heinrich Schulze, a Germa physicist discovered that images could be made by exposed silver salts to sunlight. But the images disappeared when they were taken away from sunlight. -
Joseph Niepce
Joseph Niepce, a French chemist, produced the world's first "fixed image" photograph by exposing a silvered plate in a box camera using an etching process to preserve the image. The image was a view from his window. -
William Fox Talbot
William Fox Talbot, a British scientis, coated light sensitive paper with silver nitrate and gallic acid before exposing it to light. Table salt preserved the image by making the unexposed silver inert. This method produced a negative print from which numbers of positive prints could be made by contact printing. This principle is in use today. -
Louis Daguerre
Louis Daguerre, a French painter, worked with Niepce and based his work on Niepce's process. He used silver idodide, then silver bromide coated plates. He developed them with mercury vapours and finally preserved the images with table sald. He developed an improved glass ground aperture opening and brought the exposure time fro the photos down from minutes to seconds. The imaghes he produced are known as Daguerrotypes. -
Joseph M. Petzual
Many cameras made after 1840 had better lenses than those in the early camera obscuras. In 1840, Joseph ,. Petzual designed a portrait lens and a landscape lens. The portrait lens let in 16 times more light and therefore made shorter exposure time possible. Petzual's landscape lens produced sharper pictures of large areas than had been possible before. -
Calotype
Fox-Talbot patented his improved process which he called Calotype. First recored of a photography being taken in Australia. -
Frederick Scott Archer
Frederick Scott Archer, a British photographer, introduced the wet plate process. He coated a glass plate with a wet substance called Collodian which was then dipped in light sensitive silver salts. The collodian had to remain moist during exposure so the photographer often had to carry his "darkroom" with him. -
Dr Richard Leach Maddox
Dr Richard Leach Maddox invented the gelatin emulision dry plate. He found that collodian could be replaced with gelatin as a means of holding the silver sals to the glass. He sold coated plates, which could be used in a dry state, to the photographer. -
George Eastman
George Eastman, an American, while in business manufacturing dry plates, used a roll of paper instead of glass and sold this already fitted into a camera. The camera was returned to Eastman for processing into 100 mounted prints. He called his company "Kodak". -
Photographic Film
Eastman used celluloid instead of paper for the base and produced the photographic film as we know it today. People, if they wished, could develop their film at home. -
Folding Camera
First Kodak folder camera. Thomas Alva Edison, W. K. L. Dickson show a 20 second movie on a 35mm film. -
Public Screening
First public screening of motion pictures in Paris -
Box Brownie
Kodak introduces the Box Brownie. -
Autochrome
The first colour film, Autochrome, goes on sale. -
35mm Camera
Kodak's first 35mm camera. -
Kodachrome
Kodachrome introduced - intially for movie film then later as still film. -
Electronic Flash
Electronic Flash pioneered by Harold Edgerton. -
Polaroid Camera
Dr Edwin Land introduced the Polaroid camera which had a seld-developing process. It produced a positive in 60 seconds. Self-developing cameras now only take 10 seconds.
