The following list comprises significant milestones in the development of photography technology.
Timeline
Prior to the 19th century
1614 – In Septem planetarum terrestrium spagirica recensio,[2]Angelo Sala reported that "Si lapidem lunearem pulveratum ad solem exponas instar atramenti niggerimus" (When you expose powdered silver nitrate to sunlight, it turns black as ink), and also its effect on paper; silver nitrate wrapped in paper for a year turned black.[3]
c. 1717[4] –
Johann Heinrich Schulze makes fleeting sun prints of words by using
stencils, sunlight, and a bottled mixture of
chalk and
silver nitrate in
nitric acid, simply as an interesting way to demonstrate that the substance inside the bottle darkens where it is exposed to light.
c. 1794 –
Elizabeth Fulhame invented the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction. She describes catalysis as a process at length in her 1794 book An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous.[5]
c. 1800 –
Thomas Wedgwood conceives of making permanent pictures of
camera images by using a durable surface coated with a light-sensitive chemical. He succeeds only in producing
silhouettes and other shadow images, and is unable to make them permanent.
19th century
1810 –
Thomas Johann Seebeck records near-true colours of the solar spectrum on paper sensitised with
silver chloride, though is unable to preserve the results, and his report is included in
Goethe's Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre).
1816 –
Nicéphore Niépce succeeds in making
negative photographs of camera images on paper coated with
silver chloride, but cannot adequately "fix" them to stop them from darkening all over when exposed to light for viewing.[6]
1822 – Niépce abandons
silver halide photography as hopelessly impermanent and tries using thin coatings of
Bitumen of Judea on metal and glass. He creates the first fixed, permanent photograph, a copy of an engraving of
Pope Pius VII, by
contact printing in direct sunlight without a camera or lens. It is later destroyed; the earliest surviving example of his
"heliographic process" is from 1825.[1]
1824 – Niépce makes the first durable, light-fast camera photograph, similar to his surviving 1826–1827 photograph on pewter but created on the surface of a
lithographic stone.[7] It is destroyed in the course of subsequent experiments.
1826 –
Mary Somerville a Scottish science writer and polymath conducted a series of experiments to explore the relationship between light and magnetism and she published her first paper, "The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar spectrum", in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.[8]
1826 or 1827 – Niépce makes what is now
the earliest surviving photograph from nature,[1] a landscape. It requires an exposure in the camera that lasts at least eight hours and probably several days.
1834 –
Hércules Florence, a French-Brazilian painter and the isolate inventor of photography in Brazil, coined the word photographie for his technique, at least four years before
John Herschel coined the English word photography.[9]
1835 –
Henry Fox Talbot produces durable silver chloride camera negatives on paper and conceives the two-step negative-positive procedure used in most non-electronic photography up to the present.[10]
1839
Louis Daguerre publicly introduces his
daguerreotype process, which produces highly detailed permanent photographs on silver-plated sheets of copper. At first, it requires several minutes of exposure in the camera, but later improvements reduce the exposure time to a few seconds. Photography suddenly enters the public consciousness and Daguerre's process is soon being used worldwide.
Talbot publicly introduces the paper-based process he worked out in 1835, calling it "photogenic drawing", but it requires much longer exposures than the daguerreotype and the results are not as clear and detailed.[10]
Hippolyte Bayard presents the first public exhibition of photographs. He claims to have invented a photographic process prior to Daguerre and Talbot.
Sarah Anne Bright creates a series of
photograms, six of which are known to still exist. These are the earliest surviving photographic images created by a woman.
John Herschel introduces hyposulfite of soda (now known as
sodium thiosulfate but still nicknamed "hypo") as a highly effective
fixer for all silver-based processes. He also makes the first glass negative.
Mungo Ponton a Scottish inventor, discovered that dichromates are light sensitive leading to
Gum bichromate printing another permanent form of photography and additions for improvements in others including contrast increase with cyanotype, and salt printing.[11]
1841 – Talbot introduces his patented
calotype (or "talbotype") paper negative process, an improved version of his earlier process that greatly reduces the required exposure time.[10]
1843 –
Anna Atkins Publishes first photobook. British Algae.
1848 –
Edmond Becquerel makes the first full-color photographs, but they are only laboratory curiosities: an exposure lasting hours or days is required and the colors are so light-sensitive that they sometimes fade right before the viewer's eyes while being examined.
1850s –
Combination printing was introduced, probably first suggested by Hippolyte Bayard when he thought of using a separate negative of a properly exposed sky in combination with a proper negative of the landscape or monument documented for the
Missions Héliographiques that started in 1851.
1854
British Journal of Photography (initially established as the Liverpool Photographic Journal) first issue was published on 14 January 1854
André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri credited with introduction of the carte de visite (English: visiting card or calling card) format for
portraiture. Disdéri uses a camera with multiple lenses that can photograph eight different poses on one large negative. After printing on
albumen paper, the images are cut apart and glued to calling-card-size mounts.
1857 – In America David Acheson Woodward patents the
solar camera, derived from the earlier solar microscope,[14] using sunlight to make enlargements from glass negatives[15]
1861 –
James Clerk Maxwell presents a projected
additive color image of a multicolored ribbon, the first demonstration of color photography by the three-color method he suggested in 1855. It uses three separate black-and-white photographs taken and projected through red, green and blue color
filters. The projected image is temporary but the set of three "color separations" is the first durable color photograph.
1868 –
Louis Ducos du Hauron patents his numerous ideas for color photography based on the three-color principle, including procedures for making
subtractive color prints on paper. They are published the following year. Their implementation is not technologically practical at that time, but they anticipate most of the color processes that are later introduced.
1873 –
Hermann Wilhelm Vogel discovers dye sensitization, allowing the blue-sensitive but otherwise color-blind photographic
emulsions then in use to be made sensitive to green, yellow and red light. Technical problems delay the first use of dye sensitization in a commercial product until the mid-1880s; fully
panchromatic emulsions are not in common use until the mid-20th century.
1876 –
Hurter &
Driffield begin systematic evaluation of sensitivity characteristics of photographic emulsions — the science of
sensitometry.
1878
Heat ripening of gelatin emulsions is discovered. This greatly increases sensitivity and makes possible very short "snapshot" exposures.
Eadweard Muybridge uses a row of cameras with trip-wires to make a high-speed photographic analysis of a galloping horse. Each picture is taken in less than the two-thousandth part of a second, and they are taken in sufficiently rapid sequence (about 25 per second) that they constitute a brief real-time "movie" that can be viewed by using a device such as a
zoetrope, a photographic "first".
1889 – The first commercially available transparent celluloid roll film is introduced by the Eastman Company,[16] later renamed the
Eastman Kodak Company and commonly known as Kodak.
1891
Gabriel Lippmann announces a "method of reproducing colors photographically based on the phenomenon of interference".
1902 –
Arthur Korn devises practical
telephotography technology (reduction of photographic images to signals that can be transmitted by wire to other locations).Wire-Photos are in wide use in Europe by 1910, and transmitted to other continents by 1922.
1907 – The
Autochrome plate is introduced. It becomes the first commercially successful color photography product.
1908 –
Kinemacolor, a two-color process known as the first commercial "natural color" system for movies, is introduced.
1909 – Kodak announces a 35 mm "safety" motion picture film on an acetate base as an alternative to the highly flammable nitrate base.[16] The motion picture industry discontinues its use after 1911 due to technical imperfections.
1922 – Kodak makes 35 mm panchromatic motion picture film available as a regular stock.[16]
1923
The
16 mm amateur motion picture format is introduced by Kodak. Their
Cine-Kodak camera uses
reversal film and all 16 mm is on an acetate (safety) base.[16]
1925 – The
Leica introduces the
35 mm format to still photography.
1926 – Kodak introduces its 35 mm Motion Picture Duplicating Film for duplicate negatives. Previously, motion picture studios used a second camera alongside the primary camera to create a duplicate negative.
Kodak introduces the first
8 mm amateur motion picture film, cameras, and projectors.[16]
1934 – The
135 film cartridge is introduced, making 35 mm easy to use for photography.
1935
Becky Sharp, the first feature film made in the full-colour "three-strip" version of Technicolor, is released.
Introduction of
Kodachrome multi-layered color reversal film (16 mm only; 8 mm and 35 mm follow in 1936, sheet film in 1938).[16]
1936
Introduction by IHAGEE of the Ihagee Kine
Exakta 1, the first 35 mm SLR (
Single Lens Reflex) camera.
Agfacolor Neu (English: New Agfacolor) color reversal film for home movies and slides.
1939
Agfacolor negative and positive 35 mm color film stock for professional motion picture use (not for making paper prints).
The
View-Master 3-D viewer and its "reels" of seven small
stereoscopic image pairs on Kodachrome film are introduced.
1942 –
Kodacolor, the first color film that yields negatives for making
chromogenic color prints on paper. Roll films for
snapshot cameras only, 35 mm not available until 1958.
1949 – The
Contax S camera is introduced, the first 35 mm
SLR camera with a
pentaprism eye-level viewfinder.
1952 – Bwana Devil, a low-budget
polarized 3-D film, premieres in late November and starts a brief 3-D craze that begins in earnest in 1953 and fades away during 1954.
1974 –
Josef H. Neumann created the first
Chemograms combining the disciplines painting and photography within the fotographic layer for the first time.
1975 – Bryce Bayer of Kodak develops the
Bayer filter mosaic pattern for CCD color image sensors.
^
abc"The First Photograph – Heliography".
Archived from the original on 2009-10-06. Retrieved 2009-09-29. from Helmut Gernsheim's article, "The 150th Anniversary of Photography," History of Photography, Vol. I, No. 1, January 1977: ... In 1822, Niépce coated a glass plate ... The sunlight passing through ... This first permanent example ... was destroyed ... some years later.
^Josef Maria Eder (1978), History of photographyPaperback, New York Dover Publications, pp. 22–23,
ISBN978-0-486-23586-8
^This date is misreported as 1725 or 1727, an error deriving from the belief that a 1727 publication of Schulze's account of experiments he says he undertook about two years earlier is the original source. In fact, it is a reprint of a 1719 publication and the date of the experiments is therefore circa 1717. The dated contents page of the true original can be seen
hereArchived 2015-02-21 at the
Wayback Machine (retrieved 2015-02-21)
^
abc"WHF Talbot: Biography"Archived 2011-07-21 at the
Wayback Machine, a concise account by widely acknowledged and extensively published Talbot expert Larry J. Schaaf. Retrieved 10 September 2014.
^Hsu, Tiffany (23 June 2009).
"Kodachrome to be discontinued". Los Angeles Times. Archived from
the original on 14 February 2020. Retrieved 19 October 2020. Eastman Kodak Co. is discontinuing the storied 74-year-old color film.
The following list comprises significant milestones in the development of photography technology.
Timeline
Prior to the 19th century
1614 – In Septem planetarum terrestrium spagirica recensio,[2]Angelo Sala reported that "Si lapidem lunearem pulveratum ad solem exponas instar atramenti niggerimus" (When you expose powdered silver nitrate to sunlight, it turns black as ink), and also its effect on paper; silver nitrate wrapped in paper for a year turned black.[3]
c. 1717[4] –
Johann Heinrich Schulze makes fleeting sun prints of words by using
stencils, sunlight, and a bottled mixture of
chalk and
silver nitrate in
nitric acid, simply as an interesting way to demonstrate that the substance inside the bottle darkens where it is exposed to light.
c. 1794 –
Elizabeth Fulhame invented the concept of catalysis and discovered photoreduction. She describes catalysis as a process at length in her 1794 book An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous.[5]
c. 1800 –
Thomas Wedgwood conceives of making permanent pictures of
camera images by using a durable surface coated with a light-sensitive chemical. He succeeds only in producing
silhouettes and other shadow images, and is unable to make them permanent.
19th century
1810 –
Thomas Johann Seebeck records near-true colours of the solar spectrum on paper sensitised with
silver chloride, though is unable to preserve the results, and his report is included in
Goethe's Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre).
1816 –
Nicéphore Niépce succeeds in making
negative photographs of camera images on paper coated with
silver chloride, but cannot adequately "fix" them to stop them from darkening all over when exposed to light for viewing.[6]
1822 – Niépce abandons
silver halide photography as hopelessly impermanent and tries using thin coatings of
Bitumen of Judea on metal and glass. He creates the first fixed, permanent photograph, a copy of an engraving of
Pope Pius VII, by
contact printing in direct sunlight without a camera or lens. It is later destroyed; the earliest surviving example of his
"heliographic process" is from 1825.[1]
1824 – Niépce makes the first durable, light-fast camera photograph, similar to his surviving 1826–1827 photograph on pewter but created on the surface of a
lithographic stone.[7] It is destroyed in the course of subsequent experiments.
1826 –
Mary Somerville a Scottish science writer and polymath conducted a series of experiments to explore the relationship between light and magnetism and she published her first paper, "The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar spectrum", in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.[8]
1826 or 1827 – Niépce makes what is now
the earliest surviving photograph from nature,[1] a landscape. It requires an exposure in the camera that lasts at least eight hours and probably several days.
1834 –
Hércules Florence, a French-Brazilian painter and the isolate inventor of photography in Brazil, coined the word photographie for his technique, at least four years before
John Herschel coined the English word photography.[9]
1835 –
Henry Fox Talbot produces durable silver chloride camera negatives on paper and conceives the two-step negative-positive procedure used in most non-electronic photography up to the present.[10]
1839
Louis Daguerre publicly introduces his
daguerreotype process, which produces highly detailed permanent photographs on silver-plated sheets of copper. At first, it requires several minutes of exposure in the camera, but later improvements reduce the exposure time to a few seconds. Photography suddenly enters the public consciousness and Daguerre's process is soon being used worldwide.
Talbot publicly introduces the paper-based process he worked out in 1835, calling it "photogenic drawing", but it requires much longer exposures than the daguerreotype and the results are not as clear and detailed.[10]
Hippolyte Bayard presents the first public exhibition of photographs. He claims to have invented a photographic process prior to Daguerre and Talbot.
Sarah Anne Bright creates a series of
photograms, six of which are known to still exist. These are the earliest surviving photographic images created by a woman.
John Herschel introduces hyposulfite of soda (now known as
sodium thiosulfate but still nicknamed "hypo") as a highly effective
fixer for all silver-based processes. He also makes the first glass negative.
Mungo Ponton a Scottish inventor, discovered that dichromates are light sensitive leading to
Gum bichromate printing another permanent form of photography and additions for improvements in others including contrast increase with cyanotype, and salt printing.[11]
1841 – Talbot introduces his patented
calotype (or "talbotype") paper negative process, an improved version of his earlier process that greatly reduces the required exposure time.[10]
1843 –
Anna Atkins Publishes first photobook. British Algae.
1848 –
Edmond Becquerel makes the first full-color photographs, but they are only laboratory curiosities: an exposure lasting hours or days is required and the colors are so light-sensitive that they sometimes fade right before the viewer's eyes while being examined.
1850s –
Combination printing was introduced, probably first suggested by Hippolyte Bayard when he thought of using a separate negative of a properly exposed sky in combination with a proper negative of the landscape or monument documented for the
Missions Héliographiques that started in 1851.
1854
British Journal of Photography (initially established as the Liverpool Photographic Journal) first issue was published on 14 January 1854
André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri credited with introduction of the carte de visite (English: visiting card or calling card) format for
portraiture. Disdéri uses a camera with multiple lenses that can photograph eight different poses on one large negative. After printing on
albumen paper, the images are cut apart and glued to calling-card-size mounts.
1857 – In America David Acheson Woodward patents the
solar camera, derived from the earlier solar microscope,[14] using sunlight to make enlargements from glass negatives[15]
1861 –
James Clerk Maxwell presents a projected
additive color image of a multicolored ribbon, the first demonstration of color photography by the three-color method he suggested in 1855. It uses three separate black-and-white photographs taken and projected through red, green and blue color
filters. The projected image is temporary but the set of three "color separations" is the first durable color photograph.
1868 –
Louis Ducos du Hauron patents his numerous ideas for color photography based on the three-color principle, including procedures for making
subtractive color prints on paper. They are published the following year. Their implementation is not technologically practical at that time, but they anticipate most of the color processes that are later introduced.
1873 –
Hermann Wilhelm Vogel discovers dye sensitization, allowing the blue-sensitive but otherwise color-blind photographic
emulsions then in use to be made sensitive to green, yellow and red light. Technical problems delay the first use of dye sensitization in a commercial product until the mid-1880s; fully
panchromatic emulsions are not in common use until the mid-20th century.
1876 –
Hurter &
Driffield begin systematic evaluation of sensitivity characteristics of photographic emulsions — the science of
sensitometry.
1878
Heat ripening of gelatin emulsions is discovered. This greatly increases sensitivity and makes possible very short "snapshot" exposures.
Eadweard Muybridge uses a row of cameras with trip-wires to make a high-speed photographic analysis of a galloping horse. Each picture is taken in less than the two-thousandth part of a second, and they are taken in sufficiently rapid sequence (about 25 per second) that they constitute a brief real-time "movie" that can be viewed by using a device such as a
zoetrope, a photographic "first".
1889 – The first commercially available transparent celluloid roll film is introduced by the Eastman Company,[16] later renamed the
Eastman Kodak Company and commonly known as Kodak.
1891
Gabriel Lippmann announces a "method of reproducing colors photographically based on the phenomenon of interference".
1902 –
Arthur Korn devises practical
telephotography technology (reduction of photographic images to signals that can be transmitted by wire to other locations).Wire-Photos are in wide use in Europe by 1910, and transmitted to other continents by 1922.
1907 – The
Autochrome plate is introduced. It becomes the first commercially successful color photography product.
1908 –
Kinemacolor, a two-color process known as the first commercial "natural color" system for movies, is introduced.
1909 – Kodak announces a 35 mm "safety" motion picture film on an acetate base as an alternative to the highly flammable nitrate base.[16] The motion picture industry discontinues its use after 1911 due to technical imperfections.
1922 – Kodak makes 35 mm panchromatic motion picture film available as a regular stock.[16]
1923
The
16 mm amateur motion picture format is introduced by Kodak. Their
Cine-Kodak camera uses
reversal film and all 16 mm is on an acetate (safety) base.[16]
1925 – The
Leica introduces the
35 mm format to still photography.
1926 – Kodak introduces its 35 mm Motion Picture Duplicating Film for duplicate negatives. Previously, motion picture studios used a second camera alongside the primary camera to create a duplicate negative.
Kodak introduces the first
8 mm amateur motion picture film, cameras, and projectors.[16]
1934 – The
135 film cartridge is introduced, making 35 mm easy to use for photography.
1935
Becky Sharp, the first feature film made in the full-colour "three-strip" version of Technicolor, is released.
Introduction of
Kodachrome multi-layered color reversal film (16 mm only; 8 mm and 35 mm follow in 1936, sheet film in 1938).[16]
1936
Introduction by IHAGEE of the Ihagee Kine
Exakta 1, the first 35 mm SLR (
Single Lens Reflex) camera.
Agfacolor Neu (English: New Agfacolor) color reversal film for home movies and slides.
1939
Agfacolor negative and positive 35 mm color film stock for professional motion picture use (not for making paper prints).
The
View-Master 3-D viewer and its "reels" of seven small
stereoscopic image pairs on Kodachrome film are introduced.
1942 –
Kodacolor, the first color film that yields negatives for making
chromogenic color prints on paper. Roll films for
snapshot cameras only, 35 mm not available until 1958.
1949 – The
Contax S camera is introduced, the first 35 mm
SLR camera with a
pentaprism eye-level viewfinder.
1952 – Bwana Devil, a low-budget
polarized 3-D film, premieres in late November and starts a brief 3-D craze that begins in earnest in 1953 and fades away during 1954.
1974 –
Josef H. Neumann created the first
Chemograms combining the disciplines painting and photography within the fotographic layer for the first time.
1975 – Bryce Bayer of Kodak develops the
Bayer filter mosaic pattern for CCD color image sensors.
^
abc"The First Photograph – Heliography".
Archived from the original on 2009-10-06. Retrieved 2009-09-29. from Helmut Gernsheim's article, "The 150th Anniversary of Photography," History of Photography, Vol. I, No. 1, January 1977: ... In 1822, Niépce coated a glass plate ... The sunlight passing through ... This first permanent example ... was destroyed ... some years later.
^Josef Maria Eder (1978), History of photographyPaperback, New York Dover Publications, pp. 22–23,
ISBN978-0-486-23586-8
^This date is misreported as 1725 or 1727, an error deriving from the belief that a 1727 publication of Schulze's account of experiments he says he undertook about two years earlier is the original source. In fact, it is a reprint of a 1719 publication and the date of the experiments is therefore circa 1717. The dated contents page of the true original can be seen
hereArchived 2015-02-21 at the
Wayback Machine (retrieved 2015-02-21)
^
abc"WHF Talbot: Biography"Archived 2011-07-21 at the
Wayback Machine, a concise account by widely acknowledged and extensively published Talbot expert Larry J. Schaaf. Retrieved 10 September 2014.
^Hsu, Tiffany (23 June 2009).
"Kodachrome to be discontinued". Los Angeles Times. Archived from
the original on 14 February 2020. Retrieved 19 October 2020. Eastman Kodak Co. is discontinuing the storied 74-year-old color film.