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Wedgwood and Davy Discover Light Sensitive Chemicals
Tom Wedgwood and Humphry Davy were some of the earliest pioneers of photography. Although they couldn't make "set" the image and make it permanent, they were able to figure out how to make a surface light-sensitive and capture an image using certain chemicals. After Wedgewood's death, Davy presented their findings to the Royal Institution and solidified their place in photography's history. -
End of the Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe after a millennium of its rule in Western and Central Europe. -
The War of 1812
The War of 1812 was fought between the United States and Britain brought on by the Embargo Act of 1807 and eventually led to the burning of Washington DC and ended in an eventual treaty on Christmas Eve of 1814 -
The Monroe Doctrine
President James Monroe presented this policy during his seventh State of the Union Address, where he said that the United States opposed European interference in the Western Hemisphere. Although we didn't do much to intervene in current colonization, we declared that there would be no more colonization of the Americas. It was a defining moment in US foreign policy and was invoked by Presidents all the way up to Reagan. Its lasting impact can still be seen today in how we conduct foreign policy. -
Niepce's First Photo
In 1826 Joseph Nicephore Niepce took the earliest surviving photograph, it was made through his process called heliography- also known as Sun Writing. His photos were made on a sheet of pewter and took over 8 hours to create a direct positive. This photo was his view from a window in his house looking out on his property. -
The Father of Modern Photography
Herny Fox Talbot is often regarded as the Father of Photography because his photographic method is what all modern photography is based on. The Calotype allows for negatives to be created, so multiple prints can be produced from each negative. Talbot's first image is known as the Latticed Window and shows a window in his house taken in -
The Telegraph and Morse Code Created
Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, inventors from both the US and Europe co-created the telegraph. William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone unveiled their telegraph in 1839, which was improved upon by Morse and Vail by the introduction of Morse Code that assigned a system of long and short marks to notate letters which allowed for communication over long distances. -
The Stereoscope: The Original 3D Imaging
The Stereoscope and stereoscopic images were one of the first ways that photography was both informative and entertaining. Sir Charles Wheatstone invented it in 1838 which was further developed by David Brewster who created stereo cards that could be viewed to see a three-dimensional effect. Stereoscopic cameras took two side by side exposures creating a binocular effect. -
The Introduction of the Daguerreotype
Louis Daguerre introduced his photographic process to the public that relied on a photo being captured directly onto a polished silver surface (a latent image) and being set permanently and made visible by chemical treatment. Daguerre and Niepce worked on their creation together and sold their invention to the French Government so the general public would be able to use the technology freely. -
Anna Atkins and Photographs of British Algae
Although a rather mundane topic, Atkins was the first to document any kind of biology through photography using the cyanotype process created by her friend John Herschel. She laid various species of algae on a sheet of treated paper and the impressions they made when exposed to sunlight allowed for the first accurate images of botanical life ever. This was also the first book to have photographs as well. This paved the way for all other intersections of photography and science down the road. -
The Daguerreotypes of the Mexican-American War
The very first photos of war were taken during the Mexican-American war. They were taken by an unknown photographer and were daguerreotypes. The war was fought over land in the Southwest from Texas to California and which country should lay claim to it. As a result of winning the war, the United States grew by 529,000 square miles, being the third-largest United States land acquisition ever. -
The California Gold Rush
Gold was discovered in Sutter's Mill, California and the news brought approximately 300,000 people to California in the following five years. -
The Collodion Process is Invented
Invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851, the collodion- or wet plate- process allowed for much faster exposure times. The slide is glass instead of paper which allowed for high sensitivity to light. Collodion was poured on a glass plate, then immersed in silver nitrate. After a photo is taken on the plate, it has to be immediately brought to a dark room to be developed and it creates a negative, much like the Calotype process. -
Capturing the Moon
On August 6, 1851, John Whipple, a daguerreotypist, and George Bond, the son of the head of the Havard Observatory, worked together to produce the first-ever successful detailed image of the moon. They spent three years overcoming the numerous technical challenges with taking a long exposure of it without the movement of the moon causing the photo to blur. It was a significant accomplishment for their time and paved the way for other astronomical imaging such as the Hubble Space Telescope. -
The Crimean War is Photographed
English photographer, Roger Fenton photographed the Crimean War, a war between the Russian Empire and France, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire. He was paid to document the war by William Agnew, who hoped to make a profit from the images he brought back. Fenton was the first known photographer to document war and he did so in a way that omitted any actual battle or death. His most famous photo, "Shadow of the Valley of Death" depicts a road littered with cannonballs, left by the bloody battle. -
The Rise of Pictorialism
Throughout the late 1800s, there was a movement among photographers such as Helen Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henry Peach Robinson, and Oscar Rejlander. The point of it was to create photographs by manipulating them in some manner. It helped prove photography as an art form because their interference with the picture made it more than just merely capturing what was in front of the camera. -
Photographing the Second Opium War
Felice Beato was one of the very first people to take photos in East Asia while he was with the British Military to document the Anglo-French troops during the Second Opium War. His sequential storytelling documentation was the first of its kind and paved the way for the storytelling photo series style of photojournalism. -
The Civil War
Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America and fought against the Union until 1865 and resulted in the bloodiest war in US history. -
Gettysburg through Alex Gardner's Lens
The Battle of Gettysburg was famously photographed by Alex Gardner, an operator hired by Matthew Brady -
Tableaux Vivants
The artform of "Living Pictures" rose to popularity in the late 1800s as a way to show a dramatic photographic representation of literature, historical events, and biblical events. Two of the most famous Tableau Vivant photographers were Julia Margaret Cameron and William Lake Price. -
The First Geneva Convention
Following an era of war in Europe from Napoleon's rise to the Crimean War, the First Geneva Convention was attended by 16 countries to agree upon basic mandates and rules of warfare. This was not the famous convention following WWII, but it laid the framework for the following three conventions to occur. It also established an international recognition of the Red Cross and its duty to provide aid to the wounded during wartime. -
The Silver Gelatin Process
The Silver Gelatin process was developed by Richard Maddox in 1871 and works by having silver suspended in gelatin that makes the process for developing much easier and allows for smaller negatives like the ones throughout the twentieth century. It doesn't require sunlight to make negatives and can all be done in a darkroom after the initial exposure. For all of the benefits, it quickly replaced the collodion process in almost all cases and became the standard for decades. -
The Panic of 1873
In 1873 a financial crisis and economic depression swept across Europe and North America until 1877. It had many varying causes t such as inflation in the US, over-speculation on railroad investing, the Coinage Act of 1873, and the Franco-Prussian war. These factors all came together to create the worst economic crisis in history until the Great Depression. -
Edison's Incandescent Lightbulb
Although the original light bulb was created by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1802, Thomas Edison produced the first durable and commercially available light bulb. The filaments in his bulbs were made of carbonized thread which allowed them to glow from very low voltage and for much longer than before. He was financially backed by investors such as JP Morgan and his light bulbs paved the way for a brighter future. -
The Kodak Company is Founded
George Eastman founded the Kodak Company in 1888 and released the original Kodak camera that same year. Its slogan "You Push the Button, We Do the Rest" was a clever way to make Eastman's original business of photo development into a multi-billion dollar company today. He let photography become an everyday thing, by handling the chemistry of development, it didn't take a professional to take pictures anymore. He revolutionized photography, bringing it into the modern-day. -
The Wounded Knee Massacre
In 1890, the US Army attempted to disarm the camp of Lakota Natives and after a gun fired, they ended up killing between 250 and 300 men, women, and children. The 7th Cavalry Regiment led by James Forsyth carried out this operation, losing 31 soldiers in the battle. It marked the end of the "wild west" era of the American frontier as the country moved forward into a more modern society.
