12 Key dates in the history of photography
Photography in the 21st century is as effortless as pointing a phone and tapping. A person can take a seemingly infinite number of shots of cats scrunched in boxes, dinners at new restaurants, or views out airplane windows and then immediately share them on social media, flooding the feeds of followers. But at its beginningâbefore selfies, Instagram filters, and viral memesâphotography was much slower and sometimes cumbersome. Here are 12 key dates that got us from the ancient camera obscura to the image-saturated world we live in today.
About 400 bce: Photography described
The concept of photographyâor at least the principle of projecting an image, using lightâwas known in the ancient world. Perhaps the earliest account of the phenomenon was by the Chinese philosopher Mozi about 400 bce. He explained that when light rays from an object that is illuminated by a light source pass through a pinhole into a dark room, they project an inverted image of the object on the opposite wall. This observation became the basis for the camera obscura, the photographic cameraâs ancestor.
10th or 11th century ce: The first camera obscura built
The Arab astronomer and mathematician Ibn al-Haythamis thought to have been the first to build a camera obscura. Based on the phenomenon described by Mozi, the camera obscura comprises a dark chamber in which a hole or a lens in one wall admits light rays that project on the opposite wall an inverted image of the exterior view. For centuries the camera obscura was used for viewing eclipses of the Sun without endangering the eyes and, by the 16th century, as an aid to drawing. Portable versions were later built, followed by smaller models. However, the projected image of the camera obscura is dynamic, and one of the central problems in the invention of photography was how to fix the image.
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1826/27: The first photograph made
An early successful attempt to fix an image occurred a few centuries and many experiments later. In 1826 or 1827 the French inventor NicĂ©phore NiĂ©pce made the first permanent photograph, using a process he called heliography. The method involved applying a light-sensitive solution to a polished metal plate (in this case, bitumen over pewter), placing the plate in a small camera obscura, and then pointing the camera lens toward an illuminated object. For this work NiĂ©pce exposed the plate to the sunlit view outside an upstairs window of his country estate, Le Gras, for several hours or possibly days. The result was a black-and-white image of the houseâs wings on the right and left sides of the frame, the triangular shape of a barnâs sloping roof in the center, and the silhouettes of a tree and a chimney in the background. NiĂ©pce acknowledged, however, that heliography needed improvement, and he partnered with Louis-Jacques-MandĂ© Daguerre, a professional scene painter for the theater, to perfect the process.
1839: The invention of the daguerreotype announced
NiĂ©pce died without seeing further advances in heliography, but Daguerre built on NiĂ©pceâs process, inventing the daguerreotype. He placed a polished copper plate coated with light-sensitive silver iodide in a lens-fitted camera. After briefly exposing the plate, he treated it with mercury vapor to produce a latent image and then fixed the image, using a solution of common salt. The lifelike qualities of the positive image and the relatively short exposure time made the daguerreotype process the first widely used photographic method. Yet the daguerreotype was a unique image that was difficult to reproduce.
1841: The calotype method patented
The ability to create multiple positive images came a couple of years later, when the English chemist, linguist, and archaeologist William Henry Fox Talbot patented the calotype. Talbot had been experimenting with photography for years, and, even as the daguerreotypeâs popularity rapidly increased throughout the world, he continued to perfect his alternative technique. By 1841 he had succeeded in fixing a negative image on light-sensitized paper that needed less than one minute of exposure. From that image he could create multiple positive images. Although the daguerreotype remained popular, it was the calotype that laid the foundation for modern film photography, in which negatives allow many positives to be printed.
1888: The first Kodak placed on the market
Paper negatives were a key feature of the Kodak camera, the first handheld device that was simple enough to be used by those without technical expertise. Sold beginning in 1888 by the American entrepreneur George Eastmanâs company, the Kodak contained a 100-exposure roll of paper negatives. Once the roll was used up, the consumer sent the camera to the manufacturer for developing, printing, and reloading. âYou press the button, we do the restâ was the companyâs slogan. The next year the paper negatives were replaced by plastic film, which had been invented in 1887 by Hannibal Goodwin in Newark, New Jersey. In 1900 Eastman launched the Brownie camera, which sold for a dollar. It had a removable film container, so the whole unit no longer needed to be sent back to the plant. The Kodak camera effectively ushered in the era of mass amateur photography.
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1907: Autochrome introduced
By the 20th century, photography had become a relatively simple process practiced by many enthusiasts, but its transmutation of natureâs colors into a grayscale impression had been considered a drawback since its inception. Various remedies were tried, including employing artists to hand-tint daguerreotypes and calotypes, but in 1907 the first commercially successful color photographic process was introduced by Auguste LumiĂšre and Louis LumiĂšre, the brothers known for creating, in 1895, the first motion picture. Their method, called autochrome, used a glass plate instead of plastic film. The plate was coated with light-sensitive chemicals and granules of dyed potato starch, which acted as a color filter. The process resulted in a positive color transparency that vividly captured the worldâs radiant colors. The image, however, could be viewed only with a light source, and, like the daguerreotype, it was not easy to reproduce.
1935: Kodachrome film invented
What definitively initiated the modern era of color photography was Kodachrome film, invented in 1935 by Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes, two American musicians working with Kodak Research Laboratories. In the Kodachrome process, color was achieved not with dyes during exposure but with chemicals during developing, and the technique produced color transparencies that were suitable for both projection and reproduction. The multistep process was so complicated that users had to send the exposed film to a Kodak laboratory for developing (in 1954 the company began allowing other companiesâ plants to process film). In subsequent decades Kodak introduced new films that improved on the quality, speed, and price of Kodachrome, thus making the companyâs films the most popular for amateur photography.
1969: The CCD image sensor developed
While color film was improving, a pair of physicists began the move away from it as a recording medium. In 1969 George E. Smith and Willard Boyle at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, were tasked with improving memory storage for computers. Their solution was the charge-coupled device (CCD), a type of semiconductor. The physicistsâ colleague Michael F. Tompsett saw the potential of the CCD for imaging. Because the semiconductor is sensitive to light, it can be used to measure light intensity and color (by using different filters) transmitted through a CCD cameraâs lenses. When light strikes the individual light receptors, or pixels, on the semiconductor, an electric current can be induced and translated into binary digits for storage within another digital medium, such as flash memory. Consequently, CCDs became the core of many photographic technologies, including the digital camera.
1975: The first digital camera built
American engineer Steven Sasson applied CCD technology to build the first digital camera in 1975 while he was working at Eastman Kodak. His prototype weighed close to 8 pounds (3.6 kilograms), was powered by 16 double-A batteries, and was constructed from spare parts, including a Super 8 movie camera lens. It used a CCD sensor and stored black-and-white images on a cassette tape. Although the contraption was never commercialized, it proved that photography without film is possible. Eventually, smaller, less clunky digital cameras came on the market.
1995: The CMOS active pixel sensor patented
Although CCDs were integral to digital photography, they were heavy and required a lot of power. While working for NASA, the American engineer Eric R. Fossum and his team sought a way to make digital images by using a smaller and lighter instrument. He turned to the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS), which had been invented about the same time as the CCD. Like a CCD, a CMOS can measure light intensity and color transmitted through a cameraâs lenses. Fossumâs improvement on older CMOSs and on CCDs was to adapt computer chip technology so that each pixel on the CMOS could capture light and process it directly, without having to translate it into another digital medium. This allowed digital cameras to become smaller, cheaper, and more efficient, paving the way for camera phones.
1999: The first commercially available camera phone released
The first commercially available cell phone with a camera was the Visual Phone VP-210, released in 1999 by Kyocera Corporation, an electronics manufacturer based in KyĆto. Although it was marketed as a videophone, the VP-210, with its built-in, forward-facing lens and 110,000-pixel CMOS, could take and store up to 20 images. The phone could also send two photos per second over Japanâs cellular network. The VP-210 set the stage for the next centuryâs smartphone photography, and it did not take long for cell phone manufacturers in subsequent years to upgrade this model, improving cameras, adding more storage, and expediting file sharing.