History of Photography

Introduction

     The first photographers, those of the 1800s, faced many hardships.  They had the laborious task of coating paper, glass, or metal plates with light-sensitive chemicals that would record an image.  And even under the brightest conditions, full sunlight, an exposure could take minutes.  Processing was also troublesome and tedious.
     Not so for today's photographers.  We can quickly load our cameras with films that record as many as thirty-six exposures, use fast lenses and shutter speeds to capture almost any subject, and then process and print the film with ease and confidence.  No wonder amateurs alone are estimated to shoot more than six billion pictures every year!
     How did photography evolve to where it is today -- little more than 150 years since the first-known photographic image was made?  Some historical highlights are both interesting and helpful for understanding the photographic process.

In The Beginning

     Initially, man made a drawing or painting to record something.   Much later he learned that if light was allowed to enter a darkened room through a tiny hole in one of the walls, the scene outside the room would appear upside down on the opposite wall.  This is the principle of camera obscura, which was popular with artists who wanted to record details of nature in accurate perspective.
     After 1568, when a lens was first used to make sharper and brighter images, all kinds of unique cameras obscura were made, including portable models.   Soon, people wanted something to record permanently what the camera obscura projected; a light-sensitive material was needed to capture and hold these images.
     The first known photographic research was by a German chemist, Johann Schulze (1727).  He discovered that silver salts darkened when exposed to light.  Schulze prepared copies of stenciled letters with a mixture of silver nitrate and chalk.  It does not appear, however, that he had any idea of combining his discovery with the camera obscura principle, which had been described nearly three centuries before in the writings of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519);  It was not until 1802 that a record is known of experiments of this nature.  A paper published in that year in the "Journal of the Royal Institute" (London) by Thomas Wedgewood described the copying of paintings on glass and the making of silhouettes by the action of light upon paper soaked with silver nitrate.  The process as carried out had two drawbacks:  no means was known of fixing the image to prevent darkening of the unexposed parts of the image, and the method was very slow.
    Finally, in 1826, the first permanent photographic image was made by Frenchman Joseph Niepce.  He discovered a way to reproduce engraving's onto pewter plates by using a certain type of bitumen and lavender oil.  Then he tried this process with a camera obscura, making an eight-hour exposure from the window of his home in Gras.  This novel graphic art printing method is called lithography.
     Meanwhile, Louis Daguerre was experimenting with silver-iodide images.  Hearing of Niepce's work, he contacted him, and in 1829 they became partners.  During the next few years Daguerre, with Niepce's help, worked out the process that came to be known as daguerreotype.  It was a complicated procedure that demanded considerable skill.  A silver-coated sheet of copper was sensitized by treatment with iodine vapor, forming a coating of light-sensitive silver iodide.  The daguerreotype plate was exposed in the camera and then developed in mercury fumes at temperatures of about 120 degrees F.  Then exposed areas absorbed mercury atoms and fixed by washing it in hypo.
     The daguerreotypes silver image was capable of rendering exquisitely fine detail.  It was a single-image process, incapable of reproduction.   Furthermore, the process required exposures of up to several minutes even in bright sunlight, which limited the photographers choice of subjects to those that were motionless.
     About the time daguerreotypes were becoming well known, Englishman William Henry Fox Tabot perfected another photographic method called the calotype--for which he is credited as being the father of modern photography.  Tabot coated fine writing paper with light-sensitive emulsion, put it in a camera obscura, and got a reverse image (naming it a "negative").  By placing this negative in contact with another piece of sensitized paper, he could reverse the image back to a positive.  Importantly, he could repeat this second process, making as many positives as he wanted from the same negative.
    At first Tabot had trouble making his images permanent, as had Daguerre, until it was discovered that soaking the prints or plates in hypo sulfite permanently fixed the photographic images.  (The "fixer" used by photographers today is still often called hypo, although its real chemical name is sodium thiosulfate).
     In 1851 F. Scott Archer of England made public his wet-collodion process, in which he used a glass plate coated with collodion as a base for light-sensitive silver halides.  His procedure, requiring seven steps, was only slightly less complicated the the daguerreotype process, but it was considerably less expensive.  It also produce a negative that was much sharper than that of the calotype method.  Soon the wet-collodion process had supplanted both the older techniques as the most widely used process of photography.
     A major inconvenience of the wet-collodion method was the fact that the plate was light-sensitive only as long as it remained wet; after it dried it lost its sensitivity.  Thus plates had to be used almost immediately after preparation.   Since these plates could not be prepared and stockpiled in advance, a portable darkroom, in the form of a ten, wagon, or railway car, for instance, had to accompany the camera wherever it went.
     In 1871 a new era in photography began when an amateur English photographer, R.L. Maddox, produce a successful dry plate that retained its light-sensitivity after drying.  Other inventors followed his lead, and soon fast, reliable dry plates, much more convenient to use than the earlier wet plates, became available at a reasonable cost.
     In the 1880's the American George Eastman put flexible roll film on the market, and in 1889 he introduced the first Kodak camera with the slogan, "You push the button and we do the rest."  Thus was launched the era of mass-market photography.

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William Henry Fox Tabot, inventor of the paper negative, paper positve form of photography.

Joseph Niepce (1765-1833)

Louis Jacques Daguerre (1789-1851)

George Eastman
Founder of the Kodak Company