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Sir Issac Newton
Issac Newton shares his discover that light is the source of color. He used a prism to demonstrate how white light is made up of various colors. He used another to demonstrate how light streams of these various colors can be combined to create a single white light stream. -
Camera Obscura
Until the 17th century, artist would use a method of capturing light through a pinhole and tracing the image created by the manipulated light to take real-life pictures. -
Johann Heinrich Schulze
Professor J.H. Schulze mixed chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask. He noticed darken that the compound darkened when exposed to sunlight. With this, he accidentally created the first photo-sensitive compound. -
1st Panorama opens
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Portable Camera Obscura
During the 17th century, the camera obcura design was altered from the size of a room to that of a portable box. -
Thomas Wedgwood
Thomas Wedgwood makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate. But the image soon faded. -
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper. This allowed people to capture the images without need of great artistic skill. But the paper had to be exposed for hours for the desired image to be captured. The image still faded with time. -
Niépce
Niépce creates a permanent image. -
William Henry Fox Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot almost accidentally discovers a photographic system working independently in England. He imagined how nice it would be if the camera obscura's images could be imprinted durably and remain fixed on the paper. His experiments lead to the creation of a negative image using sodium chloride and silver nitrate. He then began to try to make positives from the negatives. -
Talbot
Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent negative images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. Talbot created positive images by contact printing onto another sheet of paper. -
Talbot
Talbot begins to experiment to discover how a permanent positive image might be made from a negative. He believed that if the paper the negative was recorded on was transparent and as such fixed it could therefore be rendered insensitive to the further action of light. -
1st permanent image
Louis Daguerre's first daguerreotype - the first image that was fixed and did not fade and needed under thirty minutes of light exposure. He created the image on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury. He 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. -
Sir William Herschel
Herschel successfully fixes sensitized paper using his 1819 discovery of hyposulphite of soda dissolved in silver salts. this chemical is still used today called sodium thiosulfate. He also coins the term photography. -
Multiple prints
William Henry Talbot patents the Calotype process - the first negative-positive process making possible the first multiple copies. The process made a durable negative which was then used to make positives. -
Frederick Scott Archer
Frederick Scott Archer invented the Collodion process - images required only two or three seconds of light exposure. He improved photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion (nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcoohol) 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 -
Panoramic camera
Thomas Sutton creates and patents a single relex plate camera- the Panoramic camera. -
Steroscope viewer
Oliver Wendell Holmes invents stereoscope viewer. This allowed the user to see the image in 3D. -
Color photos
James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates 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. -
Moving pictures
Eadweard Muybridge's took a series of famous photographs which showed how a horse galloped. It was noticed that when the photos were viewed in sequence the horse seemed to be moving. -
Dry plates
Dry plates were being manufactured commercially due to increase in popularity of the photography process. -
Hand held cameras
smaller scale hand held cameras were being mass produced for use by the general public. -
Paper-based film
George Eastman invents flexible, paper-based photographic film -
1st Kodak camera
First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures. -
X-ray
The first X-Ray photo is taken when Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen noticed that a bit of barium platinocyanide emitted a fluorescent glow. He then laid a photographic plate behind his wife's hand. Previously, physicians were unable to look inside a person's body without making an incision. Roentgen was the recipient of the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901 -
Film
Reverend Hannibal Goodwin patents celluloid photographic film -
Brownie
The Browning (Brownie) is the first mass marketed camera -
Color film
First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France -
1st 35mm still camera
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Photojournalism
Photographs and text started being used together extensively in magazines (especially initially in Germany). In this decade and the 1930's, The way photographs and text were integrated with each other came to be called photojournalism. The minature cameras with high speed lenses were designed to create images that brought the viewer into the scene. -
Flash bulb
General Electric invents the modern flash bulb -
1st multi-layered color film
Development of Kodachrome, the first multi-layered color film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera -
Electric photography
Chester Carlson receives patent for electric photography (xerography) -
1st underwater camera
EG&G develops extreme depth underwater camera for U.S. Navy -
1st instant film
First color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos -
1st photo of Earth from the moon
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1st digital camera
Steve Sasson at Kodak builds the first working CCD-based digital still camera
