Ancient Times:
Camera Obscuras were used in this time to form images via a pinhole on walls in darkened rooms.
16th Century:
The brightness and clarity of Camera Obscuras was improved in this time by enlarging the hole and inserting the telescopic lens.
17th Century:
Camera Obscuras and Camera Lucida was frequently use by artists and made portable in the form of a sedan chairs; according to the Hockney-Falco thesis as argued by artist David Hockney.
However this theory is disputed by todays contemporary realist artists who can create similar levels of realism without using the Camera Obscuras Box. These early cameras did not fix an image but projected the image on a wall or canvas, allowing the artist to simply trace and colour the image. Thus creating very anatomically correct and realistic paintings.
The phrase 'Camera Obscura' literally means 'dark chamber'.
Although not a camera in the way we think of them now (being able to record a fixed image) it was however an important step in devloping the technology we have today.
Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated that light is the source of colour. He used a prism to split sunlight into its constituent colours and another to recombine them to make white light.
1727:
Professor J. Shulze mixed chalk, nitric acid and silver in a flask. He noticed darkening on the side of the flask that had been exposed to sunlight. He had accidentally created the first photo-sensitive compound.
1758:
Dolland developed the Achromatic telescope lens, this improved the camera obscura image.
1800:
Thomas Wedgwood made "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate which resulted in images deteriorating rapidly.
The German astronomer William Herschel was the first to discover that light is not always visible to the naked eye. During an optical experiment, Herschel passed sunlight through a prism to separate the white light into its coloured components. Using a thermometer, he measured the temperature of each of the coloured rays and determined that the temperature increased from blue to red.
Pushing his experiment a little bit further, Herschel placed the thermometer beyond the red light rays where no light was visible. To his great surprise, he measured a temperature even higher than that within any of the visible rays. He proved, for the first time ever, that invisible light – the infrared – exists beyond the red portion of the light spectrum.
1802:
Thomas Wedgwood then produced silhouettes of opaque objects by contact printing them on silver nitrate coated paper however the images were unfixed and faded in daylight.
1816:
The French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper but he did not mange to capture a fixed image for ten years.
1826:
The first permanent photograph was produced (a Heliograph)! The French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce captured the image on a polished pewter plate covered with a petroleum derivative called bitumen of Judea. Produced with a camera, the image required an eight-hour exposure in bright sunshine. Bitumen hardens with exposure to light. The unhardened material may then be washed away and the metal plate polished, rendering a negative image which then may be coated with ink and impressed upon paper, producing a print. Niépce then began experimenting with silver compounds based on a Professor Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1727 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light.
1833:
In 1833 Niépce died of a stroke, leaving his notes to French painter and inventor Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. While he had no scientific background, Daguerre made two pivotal contributions to the process.
He discovered that exposing the silver first to iodine vapour before exposure to light and then to mercury fumes after the photograph was taken could form a latent image. Bathing the plate in a salt bath then fixed the image.
However, in 1832 theFrench-Brazilian painter and inventor Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process, naming it Photographie.
1834:
Henry Fox Talbot began work on creating permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. Talbot was attempting to create positive images by contact printing onto another sheet of paper.
1836:
Herschel invented a photometer ('astrometer' as he called it) that allowed the observer to visually compare the brightness of stars using a scale based on the reduced telescopic image of the Moon. It was the first true photometer.
1837:
Louis Daguerre created images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and developed them with warmed mercury. Daguerre was awarded a state pension by the French government in exchange for publication of methods and the rights by other French citizens to use the Daguerreotype process.
1839:
After reading about Daguerre's invention Fox Talbot worked on perfecting his own process. In 1839 Talbot got a key improvement; an effective fixer from John Herschel the astronomer, who had previously showed that hyposulfite of soda (also known as hypo, or now sodium thiosulfate) would dissolve silver salts. Talbot presented papers at the Royal Institution and the Royal Society on creating a negative to positve process.
Later that year Herschel made the first glass negative and suggesting fixing Talbot's images in sodium thiosulphate. The German astronomer Johann Heinrich von Mädler came up with term “photography” in 1839 by combining 'photo' (from the Greek word for light) and 'graphy' (to write). The word was quickly popularized by the British astronomer John Frederick William Herschel, who is often mistakenly given credit for inventing the word. He did however, coin the terms 'negative' and 'positive' in relation to photography.
The French astronomer Dominique François Jean Arago proposed the design of a new photometer using photographic principles. His goal was to eliminate the role played by the observer in determining the brightness of an object by rendering the technique completely objective.
1840:
The first American patent issued in photography was to Alexander Wolcott for his camera.
In 1840, the American doctor and chemist John William Draper produced a daguerreotype of the Moon: the first astronomical photograph ever created in North America.
1841:
William Henry Talbot patented the Calotype process creating the first negative to positive process, making possible the first multiple copies unlike the Daguerreotype process. By patenting this process, Talbot greatly limited its adoption. He spent the rest of his life in lawsuits defending the patent until he gave up on photography.
1842:
The French optician Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours photographed the Sun for the first time in 1842, but no details were visible. It would take another couple of years, in 1844 to be exact, for the French physicists Jean Bernard Léon Foucault and Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau to take the first detailed photograph of the Sun in which solar spots are visible.
The French physicist Alexandre Edmond Becquerel placed a daguerreotype plate in front of the solar spectrum to record its image. It was the first photograph of our Sun’s spectrum.
1843:
The first advertisement with a photograph was made in Philadelphia.
1844:
The French physicists Jean Bernard Léon Foucault and Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau conducted a series of experiments for Arago in which a photometer was coupled with a daguerreotype. It took until 1885 for photographic plates to be systematically used in photometry. It was in that year that the Dutch astronomer Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn began to measure the brightness of 454,875 stars from the Southern Hemisphere.
Later in the 1840's:
George Eastman refined Talbot's process, which is the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today. Hippolyte Bayard had also developed a method of photography but delayed announcing it and so was not recognised as its inventor.
1850:
Blanquart-Evrard proposed the use of Albumen for printing paper. Albumen paper was never patented and was popularly used for 40 years.
1851:
Frederick Scott Archer invented the Collodion process. Images required only two or three seconds of light exposure. A sculptor by trade in London, he improved photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion (nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcohol) and chemicals on sheets of glass. Wet plate collodion photography was much cheaper than daguerreotypes. The negative/positive process permitted unlimited reproductions, and the process was published but not patented.
1853:
Nada (Felix Toumachon) opened his portrait studio in Paris.
1854:
Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade.
1855 - 57:
1855 was the beginning of stereoscopic era. Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal (tintypes or ferrotypes) were popular in the US.
1861:
A Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrated a color photography system involving three black and white photographs, each taken through a red, green or blue filter. The photos were turned into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same color filters. This is the "color separation" method.
In the same year Oliver Wendell Holmes invented the stereoscope viewer.
1861 - 65:
Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covered the American Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives. Several patentable methods for producing images (by either additive or subtractive methods) were devised from 1862 on by two French inventors (working independently), Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros. In 1865 photographs and photographic negatives are added to protected works under copyright.
1868:
The French inventor Ducas de Hauron published a book proposing a variety of methods for color photography.
1870:
Was the center of period in which the US Congress sent photographers out to the West. The most famous images were taken by William Jackson and Tim O'Sullivan.
1871:
Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor invented the gelatin dry plate silver bromide process (the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate). Negatives no longer had to be developed immediately.
1873 - 74:
Practical methods to sensitize silver halide film to green and then orange light were discovered in 1873 and 1884 by Hermann W. Vogel (full sensitivity to red light was not achieved until the early years of the 20th century).
1877:
Eadweard Muybridge, born in England as Edward Muggridge, settles "do a horse's four hooves ever leave the ground at once" bet among rich San Franciscans by time-sequenced photography of Leland Stanford's horse.
1878:
Dry plates (Richard Leach Maddox's invention) were manufactured commercially.
1880:
George Eastman aged 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York and the first half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper; the New York Graphic.
The British chemist William de Wiveleslie Abney was the first to take an infrared photograph. It was an image of a hot teapot that he recorded using a special collodion emulsion. Unfortunately, the composition of the collodion was not revealed and, for the next twenty years, all attempts to produce another infrared photograph failed.
1884:
George Eastman invents flexible, paper-based photographic film.
1888:
Eastman patents the first Kodak camera, which containied a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures. He would later go on to found the Eastman-Kodak company in 1892.
1889:
The Kodak camera was improved by using a roll of film instead of paper.
1890:
Jacob Riis publishes 'How the Other Half Lives'; images of tenament life in New York City.
1897:
Circuit panorama Camera, Arthur C. Pillsbury, Stanford University, his senior prroject. He used this to record the Gold Rush in the Yukon and the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire among other famous shots.
1898:
The Reverend Hannibal Goodwin patented celluloid photographic film.
1900:
The Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera was introduced. The first mass marketed camera!
1902:
Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in New York City.
1906:
There was increased availability of panchromatic black and white film and therefore high quality color separation color photography. J.P. Morgan financed Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of the North American Indian.
1907:
The first fully practical color plate2 the ' Autochrome' plates were manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France. It was based on a screen-plate method, the screen (of filters) was made using dyed dots of potato starch. The screen lets filtered red, green or blue light through each grain to a photographic emulsion in contact with it. The plate is then developed to a negative, and reversed to a positive, which when viewed through the screen restores colors approximating the original.
1909:
Lewis Hine hired by US National Child Labor Committee to photograph children working mills.
First nature movie made by Arthur C. Pillsbury and shown at the Studio of the Three Arrows in Yosemite.
1912:
First time lapse camera to show growth of plants. Designed and built by Arthur C. Pillsbury, first film shown at the Studio of the Three Arrows in Yosemite.
1913 - 14:
Oscar Barnack, employed by German microscope manufacturer Leitz, developed a camera using the modern 24x36mm frame and sprocketed 35mm movie film.
1917:
Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon was established in Tokyo.
1921:
Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb; Eugegravene Atget, aged 64, was assigned to photograph the brothels of Paris.
1924:
Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera.
1925:
André Kertész moves from his native Hungary to Paris, where he begins an 11 year project photographing street life.
1927:
General Electric invents the modern flash bulb.
First Microscopic Motion Picture Camera, developed at Berkeley by Arthur C. Pillsbury using a lab loaned for the purpose.
1928:
Albert Renger-Patzsch publishes 'The World is Beautiful', consisting of close-ups emphasizing the form of natural and man-made objects. Rollei introduces the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex producing a 6x6 cm image on rollfilm. Karl Blossfeldt publishes Art Forms in Nature.
1929:
First X-ray motion picture camera, Arthur C. Pillsbury.
1930:
First Underwater Motion picture Camera, Arthur C. Pillsbury
1931:
Development of strobe photography by Harold ("Doc") Edgerton at MIT .
1932:
Inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and white negatives were made in the same camera under different filters. Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston, et al, form Group f/64 dedicated to "straight photographic thought and production".
Henri Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a 60-year career photographing people.
On March 14, George Eastman, aged 77, writes suicide note "My work is done. Why wait?" and shoots himself.
The first light meter with photoelectric cell was introduced.
During an expedition the American Albert William Stevens used an infrared filter to photograph a total eclipse of the Sun from an airplane at an altitude of 8,200 metres.
1933:
An American, Auguste Piccard, used an infrared camera to photograph the Earth’s ozone layer from onboard the hot air balloon Century of Progress.
1934:
Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji was making cameras and lenses in addition to film.
1935:
Farm Security Administration hired Roy Stryker to run a historical section. Stryker would hire Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein to photograph rural hardships over the next six years.
Roman Vishniac began his project of the soon-to-be-killed-by-their-neighbors Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.
Eastman Kodak markets Kodachrome film.
1936:
The German company Agfa was the first to sell a film with the colour formers in the film. Towards the end of the second World War their closely guarded secrets were 'liberated'.
Development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film. With the new colour film breakthroughs came the development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera.
World War II:
Development of multi-layer color negative films. Eastman Kodak introduced Kodacolor negative film. In 1942, the Eastman Kodak Company patented the first infrared-sensitive film that could produce photos using 'false colours'.
Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans and W. Eugene Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine.
Chester Carlson received patent for electric photography (xerography).
1947:
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour started the photographer owned Magnum picture agency, arguably the most famous photographic agency in the world. The agency developed a style of photojournalism that was largely based upon the capability of the Leica 35 mm camera. Magnum is still an exclusive club of illustrious photographers with membership limited to thirty six.
Dr Edwin Land Invented an 'instant' picture process, first called Polaroid Land. The special camera sandwiched the exposed negative with a receiving positive paper and spread the processing chemicals between the two. After processing these were peeled apart.
1948:
Hasselblad in Sweden offered its first medium format SLR for commercial sale.
Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm.
Edwin Land marketed the Polaroid camera and instant black and white film.
1949:
East German company Zeiss developed the Contax S. The first SLR with an unreversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder.
1954:
Eastman Kodak introduced high speed Tri-X film.
Pentax introduced the Asahiflex II. The world's first SLR with an instant return mirror.
1955:
Edward Steichen curated Family of Man exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
1957:
Asahi Pentax introduced. The world's first SLR with a penta prism thus allowing eye-level viewing with correct perspective.
The first digital image made on a computer in 1957 showed researcher Russell Kirsch's baby son and the ghostlike black and white photo only measured 176 pixels on a side.
1959:
Nikon F introduced.
1960:
EG&G developed extreme depth underwater camera for U.S. Navy.
Garry Winogrand begins photographing women on the streets of New York City.
The first automatic diaphragm was introduced.
1963:
The first color instant film was developed by Polaroid and the Instamatic camera released by Kodak.
The first purpose-built underwater camera was introduced; the Nikonos.
1968:
The first ever photograph of the Earth was taken from the Moon.
1971:
SMC coating for lenses was introduced. The first effective lens coating system.
1972:
110-format cameras introduced by Kodak with a 13x17mm frame.
1973:
Polaroid introduced one-step instant photography with the SX-70 camera.
The C-41 color negative process was introduced which replacied the C-22 process.
In 1973, the American company Fairchild Imaging developed their first commercial CCD (charge-couple device). Consisting of 100 x 100 pixels, it was used in 1974 to produce the first astronomical photo ever taken by a digital camera. It consisted of an image of the Moon captured using a 20-centimetre telescope.
1975:
Nicholas Nixon took his first annual photograph of his wife and her sisters (The Brown Sisters).
Steve Sasson at Kodak built the first working CCD-based digital still camera.
1976:
First solo show of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, William Eggleston's Guide.
Canon introduced the AE-1; the first 35mm camera with built in microprocessor.
Fairchild Imaging sold the first commercial CCD camera: the Fairchild MV-101.
1977:
George Eastman and Edwin Land were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
1978:
Konica introduced the first 'point and shoot' autofocus camera.
1979:
CCD cameras made their way into professional astronomy. The Kitt Peak National Observatory (USA) mounted a 320 x 512 pixel digital camera on their 1-metre telescope and quickly demonstrated the superiority of CCDs over photographic plates.
1980's:
A system called DX coding was introduced for 35mm films. The cassettes have an auto-sensing code printed on them which enable certain cameras to automatically set the film speed, this information can also be used by processing laboratories.
1980:
Elsa Dorfman begins making portraits with the 20x24" Polaroid. Sony demonstrates first consumer camcorder.
ME-F, the world's first 35 mm SLR Auto Focus camera by Pentax.
1982:
Sony demonstrates Mavica 'still video' camera.
1983:
Kodak introduced disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same as in the Minox spy camera).
the use of CCD cameras became much more widespread among professional observatories. For the first time ever, it was possible to study celestial objects thousands of time paler than anything recorded on even the most sensitive photographic plates, putting a whole new face on the Universe.
Today, digital cameras are an integral part of the standard equipment in a professional observatory. The largest, MegaCam (mounted on the 3.6-m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in 2006) uses a mosaic of 40 CCDs for a total of 340 million pixels.
1984:
Canon demonstrates first digital electronic still camera.
1985:
The Minolta 7000 auto-focus 35mm SLR camera was introduced (called "Maxxum" in the US).
Pixar introduces digital imaging processor.
1986:
The first 35 mm compact with a built in zoom lens from Pentax is introduced.
1987:
The popular Canon EOS system was introduced, with the new all-electronic lens mount.
1990:
Adobe Photoshop 1.0 image manipulation program is introduced for Apple Macintosh computers.
Eastman Kodak announced Photo CD as a digital image storage medium.
1991:
Kodak DCS-100 introduced the first digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3.
1992:
Tim Berners-Lee developed the software and protocol for the World Wide Web (WWW).
Kodak introduced PhotoCD.
1996:
Advanced Photo System (APS) is introduced. APS uses a cassette which holds 24 mm wide film on a base which has a magnetic data strip as well as fine grained emulsion. When the film is being developed automatic handling mechanisms locate the correct frames and determines the required print format from the data strip. After processing the film is rewound into the cassette and a digitally mastered index print of all the frames is created as a reference for reordering.
1997:
Pentax 645N, the world's first autofocus medium format SLR.
1998:
The first consumer megapixel cameras were introduced and we finally enter a truly digital age.
1999:
Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000, first ground-up DSLR design by a leading manufacturer.
2000:
Canon introduced the EOS D30, the first digital SLR for the consumer market with a CMOS sensor.
In November 2000 Sharp and J-Phone introduced the first camera phone in Japan. The J-SH04 is a mobile phone with a built in camera, it uses a 110,000-pixel CMOS image sensor and began the trend for camera-phones. These cameras play an increasingly significant role in photography, for example the main news pictures covering the 7 July 2005 London bombings were taken by the general public on camera-phones and not by professional news crews. However the use of camera phones can also be abused leading to invasions of privacy and other forms of socially unacceptable behaviour.
2001:
Polaroid is declared bankrupt.
2002:
Contax introduced the NDigital the first SLR digital camera with a CCD the same size as a 35 mm frame.
2003:
Four-Thirds standard for compact digital SLRs introduced with the Olympus E-1.
Canon introduced their Digital Rebel camera for less than $1000.
2004:
Kodak ceased production of film cameras.
2005:
Canon introduced the EOS 5D. The first consumer priced, full frame digital SLR, with a 24x36mm CMOS sensor for $3000.