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Origin of the United Kingdom
The Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merged to form the United Kingdom. -
Wedgwood and Davy's Experimentation
Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy were the first to attempt to experiment with light-sensitive chemicals to fix an image. Although they ended up being unsuccessful with their attempts, they became a stepping stone for future attempts at fixing images. -
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Napoleon I Bonaparte's Reign
"Napoleon I Bonaparte (1769–1821) has himself proclaimed emperor of the French. At his coronation on December 2, at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Napoleon takes the imperial crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII and places it on his own head." -
The Slave Trade Act
Even though slavery was never legal on British Soil, slavery still prospered. The Slave Trade Act enacted in 1807 did not abolish slavery but it did abolish the trade of slaves. https://www.oxford-royale.co.uk/articles/important-events-british-history-after-1500.html -
The Battle of Waterloo
"The Battle of Waterloo marked the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon rose through the ranks of the French army during the French Revolution, seized control of the French government in 1799 and became emperor in 1804. Through a series of wars, he expanded his empire across western and central Europe. The Battle of Waterloo, in which Napoleon’s forces were defeated by the British and Prussians, marked the end of his reign and of France’s domination in Europe."
https://www.history.com/ -
Nicéphore Niépce Produces the First Surviving Image
Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833), the French chemist in 1826, produces the earliest surviving photographic image. -
Invention of the Graham Cracker
The graham cracker was invented by Sylvester Graham in 1829 to provide an alternative for his vegetarian diet. http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/graham.htm -
Henry Fox Talbot's Negative
Latticed window at Lacock Abbey, August 1835. A positive from what may be the oldest existing camera negative -
First Image of a Man
The shot is actually a photograph of the Boulevard du Temple, a busy street in Paris. The photograph was a daguerreotype, and due to the long exposure process, the moving traffic was not captured on camera. This famous photograph was taken by a French man named Louis Daguerre in 1838. https://allthatsinteresting.com/louis-daguerre-oldest-photograph -
John Herschel
At the dawn of photography, invented hypo solution to fix photographs. Coined the word photography, popularizing it in the English speaking world. He was also the first to describe photographs as either negatives or positives. Invented the cyanotype, a photographic printing process that later allowed engineers and architects to produce blueprints of their designs. -
Presentation of a Daguerreotype
Members of the French Académie des Sciences were shown products of an invention that would forever change the nature of visual representation: photography. The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a Romantic painter and printmaker most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama. Each daguerreotype (as Daguerre dubbed his invention) was a one-of-a-kind image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper. -
Daguerreotype Process is dubbed
Complete instructions on how to create a daguerreotype were published. -
Henry Fox Talbot's Calotype
Unlike the daguerreotype, it produced a negative from which many prints could be made. -
Anna Atkins Creates the First Photographic Book
She was an English botanist and the first female photographer, most noted for using photography in her books on various plants. The process, known as blueprinting, was later used to reproduce architectural and engineering drawings, but Atkins chose to use it for what is considered to be the first work with photographic illustrations. Only 13 copies of the handwritten book are known to exist.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/cyanotypes-of-british-algae-by-anna-atkins-1843/ -
French Appreciation for Architectural Heritage through Photography
The French government initiates a project of documenting the nation’s architectural heritage, assigning five photographers, including Gustave Le Gray (1820–1884) and Édouard Baldus (1813–1889), to record different regions of the country. -
The Wet Collodion Process developed
The wet-collodion process, also called collodion process, an early photographic technique invented by Englishman Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. The process involved adding a soluble iodide to a solution of collodion (cellulose nitrate) and coating a glass plate with the mixture.
https://www.britannica.com/technology/wet-collodion-process -
Invention of the Potato Chip
"In 1853, Native American George Crum was employed as a chef at an elegant resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. One dinner guest found Crum's French fries too thick for his liking and rejected the order. Crum decided to rile the guest by producing fries too thin and crisp to skewer with a fork. The plan backfired. The guest was ecstatic over the browned, paper-thin potatoes, and other diners began requesting Crum's potato chips" http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/potatochips.htm -
Roger Fenton Photography
Roger Fenton documented the Crimean War in 1855. Relying on long exposures made it impossible for Mr. Fenton to stop action and capture actual battles. But he did give the British public a view of the war by portraying the lives of British enlisted men and officers, as well as showing the armaments, supply routes and the many, many horses that were the critical military transportation technology of the day.
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/roger-fenton-the-first-great-war-photographer/ -
Alexander Gardner War Photography
Gardner found employment with Mathew Brady. At first, Gardner specialized in making large photographic prints, but as Brady’s eyesight began to fail, Gardner took on more and more responsibilities. In 1858, Brady put him in charge of the entire gallery. With the start of the Civil War in 1861, the demand for portrait photography increased, as soldiers on their way to the front posed for images to leave behind for their loved ones. Gardner became one of the top photographers in this field. -
Lewis Carroll Photographs
Known primarily as the author of children's books, Lewis Carroll was also a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University and an ordained deacon. He took his first photograph in 1856 and pursued photography obsessively for the next twenty-five years. He stopped taking pictures abruptly in 1880, leaving over three thousand negative portraits. Ill at ease among adults, Carroll preferred the company of children, especially young girls.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283092 -
First Underground Railway in London
"Few Londoners could imagine getting around the city without the complicated network of trains weaving their way deep beneath the streets. The Underground, known by locals as ‘the Tube’, is such a London institution that its map design is featured heavily on tourist memorabilia." https://theculturetrip.com/europe/united-kingdom/england/london/articles/10-historical-events-that-shaped-london/ -
Julia Margaret Cameron Photography
Julia Margaret Cameron got her first camera in 1863, at the age of 48, and created hundreds of portraits that experimented with early photography’s flaws. Soft focuses, scratched images, and other distortions contributed to a dreamy quality. Although some of the British photographer’s work can appear a bit sentimental, such as the Victorian recreations of biblical and Shakespearean scenes, her portraits remain compelling. www.hyperallergic.com/401067/julia-margaret-cameron-in-progress -
Alphonse Bertillon standardizes the mugshot
One of his most important contributions to forensics was the systematic use of photography to document crime scenes. He devised a method of photographing crime scenes with a camera mounted on a high tripod, to document and survey the scene before it was disturbed by investigators. He also developed "metric photography," which used measured grids to document the dimensions of a particular space and the objects in it.
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/galleries/biographies/bertillon.html
