Time Line
· ancient times: Camera obscuras used to form images on walls in darkened rooms; image formation via a pinhole
· 16th century: Brightness and clarity of camera obscuras improved by enlarging the hole inserting a telescope lens.
· 17th century: Camera obscuras in frequent use by artists and made portable in the form of sedan chairs.
· 1727: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask; notices darkening on side of flask exposed to sunlight. Accidental creation of the first photo-sensitive compound.
· 1800: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask; notices darkening on side of flask exposed to sunlight. This event becomes the accidental creation of the first photo-sensitive compound. makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate; resulting images deteriorated rapidly, however, if displayed under light stronger than from candles.
· 1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper
· 1826: Niépce creates a permanent image
· 1834: 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.
· 1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury; Daguerre is 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.
· 1841:Talbot patented his process under the name "calotype".
· 1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal (tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the US.
· 1861: Scottish physicist 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.
· 1871: Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, proposes the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the "dry plate" process.
· 1878: Dry plates being manufactured commercially.
· 1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures.
· 1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper
· 1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and therefore high quality color separation color photography. J.P. Morgan finances Edward Curtis to document the traditional culture of the North American Indian.
· 1907: First commercial color film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France
· 1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera.
· 1931: Development of strobe photography by Harold ("Doc") Edgerton at MIT
· 1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is making cameras and lenses in addition to film.
· 1936: Development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera
· 1963: First color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos
· 1973: C-41 color negative process introduced, replacing C-22
· 1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica "still video" camera
· 1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same as in the Minox spy camera)
· 1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called "Maxxum" in the US); In the
· 1991: Kodak DCS-100, first digital SLR, a modified Nikon F3
· 1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD
· 1999: Nikon D1 SLR, 2.74 megapixel for $6000, first ground-up DSLR design by a leading manufacturer