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Timeline of the Invention of Photography
| 1727 |
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Johann
H. Schulze, a German physicist, discovers that silver salts
turn dark when exposed to light. |
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| 1780s |
|
Carl
Scheele, a Swedish chemist, shows that the changes in the
color of the silver salts could be made permanent through
the use of chemicals |
|
| 1826 |
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A
French inventor, Nicephore Niepce, produces a permanent image
by coating a metal plate with a light-sensitive chemical and
exposing the plate to light for about eight hours. |
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| 1830s |
|
Louis
Daguerre, a French inventor, develops the first practical
method of photography by placing a sheet of silver-coated
copper treated with crystals of iodine inside a camera and
exposing it to an image for 5 to 40 minutes. Vapors from heated
mercury developed the image and sodium thiosulfate made the
image permanent. |
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| 1839 |
|
A
British inventor, William H. Fox Talbot, an English classical
archaeologist, made paper sensitive to light by bathing it
in a solution of salt and silver nitrate. The silver turned
dark when exposed to light and created a negative, which could
be used to print positives on other sheets of light sensitive
paper. |
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| 1840s |
|
Josef
M. Petzval, a Hungarian mathematician, develops lenses for
portrait and landscape photographs, which produce sharper
images and admit more light, thus reducing exposure time.
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| 1851 |
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The
British photographer Frederick S. Archer develops a photographic
process using a glass plate coated with a mixture of silver
salts and an emulsion made of collodion. Because the collodion
had to remain moist during exposure and developing, photographers
had to process the pictures immediately. |
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| 1871 |
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Richard
L. Maddox, a British physician, invents the "dry-plate"
process, using an emulsion of gelatin, so that photographers
did not have to process the pictures immediately. By the late
1870s, exposure time had been reduced to 1/25th of a second.
Gelatin emulsion made it possible to produce prints that were
larger than the original negatives, allowing manufacturers
to reduce the size of cameras. |
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| 1888 |
|
George
Eastman introduces the lightweight, inexpensive Kodak camera,
using film wound on rollers. |
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