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Jan 1, 1550
Camera Obsurca
The first camera invention to capture a permanent image was created by Joseph Nicephore Niepce, [pronounced Nee-ps]. Artists used a device called a camera obscura to help them draw pictures. It was a box with a pinhole or lens in one side. -
Photochemistry Camera
While the camera obscura allowed for the viewing of images in real time, several centuries passed before inventors stumbled upon a method for permanently preserving them using chemicals. A major breakthrough came in 1725, when the German professor Johann Heinrich Schulze found that silver salts darkened when exposed to light. -
Daguerreotype
Photography’s next giant leap came courtesy of Louis Daguerre, a French artist and inventor who partnered with Niépce in the late 1820s. In 1837, Daguerre discovered that exposing iodized silver plates to light left behind a faint image that could be developed using mercury fumes. -
Calotype
Around the same time that “Daguerreotypomania” was taking hold, the British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot unveiled his own photographic process called the “Calotype.” This method traded the Daguerreotype’s metal plates for sheets of high-quality photosensitive paper. When exposed to light, the paper produced a latent image that could be developed and preserved by rinsing it with hyposulphite. -
The Wet-Collodion Process
Daguerreotypes and Calotypes were both rendered obsolete in 1851, after a sculptor named Frederick Scott Archer pioneered a new photographic method that combined crisp image quality with negatives that could be easily copied. Archer’s secret was a chemical called collodion, a medical dressing that also proved highly effective as a means for coating light-sensitive solutions onto glass plates. -
Dry Plates
or most of the 1800s, the panoply of noxious solutions and mixtures involved in using a camera made photography difficult for anyone without a working knowledge of chemistry. That finally changed in the 1870s, when Robert L. Maddox and others perfected a new type of photographic plate that preserved silver salts in gelatin. -
Flexible Roll Film
Photography didn’t truly become accessible to amateurs until the mid-1880s, when inventor George Eastman began producing film on rolls. Film was more lightweight and resilient than clunky glass plates, and the use of a roll allowed photographers to take multiple pictures in quick succession.
