We use cameras every day, whether its to check our hair, update a friend on what were doing, or maybe just capture an important moment. Photography has become a big part of today’s culture. We don’t realize how much photography has evolved allowing us the ability to document our lives through pictures, so easily. We will be examining some of the earliest known advances in photograph which brought us to where we are today. Starting with the earliest known discoveries, to midcentury advances, to today’s ability to photograph almost anything.
The earliest recorded principle behind photography was noted by a Chinese philosopher, Mo Ti, who lived during the fifth century B.C.E. Mo Ti was one of the first known individuals to have documented the phenomena of the Camera Obscura. The Camera Obscura worked by allowing the light bouncing off an external structure, into a little hole in the side of the box, the light then reflected upside down against the wall opposite of the hole, the image showed up in complete color and detail. The Camera Obscura didn’t capture images but instead manipulated them. This allowed artists to trace those images.
The first ever picture was taken by Joseph Nicephorus Niepce in 1816. Niepce had taken a silver plate and covered it in bitumen, a chemical compound, he then exposed it to eight hours of sunlight capturing the first ever photograph known to mankind. Though this did not take off during Niepce’s life time, his idea was later utilized by his understudy Louis Daguerre.
Several years later, in 1838, Daguerre invented his own camera, called the Daguerreotype. This invention was made public and revolutionized the art of photography. This design did not largely differ from Niepce’s. A silver plate was coated in a very thin silver iodide layer, the plate was then placed into a Camera Obscura and exposed to mercury vapors which then induces the image to form when introduced to light. This process took about 60-90 seconds of sitting completely still to properly capture the image.
In 1839 Hippolyte Bayard, a Frenchman, discovered a way to take pictures on paper. A paper covered in silver chloride would be blackened with light, then covered with silver iodide and put into a Camera Obscura. The development time was about 30 minutes to 2 hours. The same year an Englishman by the name of William Henry Fox Talbot developed the first negative-positive process. This made it possible to multiply one picture.
In 1841, a physicist by the name of Fizeau desired to shorten the exposure time. Fizeau replaced silver iodide with silver bromide. Silver bromide is more sensitive to light than silver iodide. This made taking portraits a lot easier for both the photographer and the poser. In 1851, Scott Archer believed if he replaced albumen with collodion the picture quality would be clearer. The black and white pictures taken with this process had reached a quality unknown until then. The pictures that had collodion were incredibly clearer and cleaner than the pictures taken with albumen. These advances would continue to be built upon.
In the years to follow, there were many tweaks to the camera to shorten exposure time and the invention of different lenses. It wasn’t until 1869, Louis Ducos du Hauron, made the first color photograph. He made three photos of the same subject, each of them through a different filter, a red, a yellow, and a blue one. He obtained three positives that he dyed with the color corresponding to each filter. By layering the images over each other, he got the resolution of the colors. Later, in 1906 physicist Gabriel Lippman received the Nobel prize for discovering a way to obtain photos in direct colors on one plate.
In 1913 the first 35mm Still Camera (also called the candid camera) was developed by Oskar Barnack. Later it became the standard for all film cameras. In 1948 Edwin Land invented the Polaroid camera which could take a picture and print it in about one minute. The evolution of cameras didn’t stop there. In 1981 Sony came out with the first digital electric camera, images from this camera were able to be displayed on television monitor. Soon after, other camera and electronic companies started coming out with their own digital cameras. Apple and many other technology companies would build even further on all of these advances to bring us the abilities we have today.
Historically cameras have drastically transformed from box, to film, to polaroid, to digital. Without the work of these inventors we wouldn’t be able to capture our precious moments. The evolution and transformation of cameras has been a collaborative effort of ideas shared among inventors to create the “cameras” of today. So next time you take a picture think about how much history went into allowing you to capture that moment and how your camera is just a snapshot of the time your living in.
