This is a drawing made in 1544 of a camera obscura.

Do you know where the word photography came from? It came from two Greek words that mean "writing with light." The first time the word "photography" was used was in 1839, the year the invention of the photographic process was made public, by Sir John Herschel.

The Chinese were the first people that we know of to write about the basic idea of the pinhole camera or "camera obscura" (Latin words meaning "dark room"). About 2,500 years ago (5th Century B.C.) they wrote about how an image was formed upside down on a wall from a pinhole on the opposite wall.

About 2,400 years ago (4th Century B.C.) the famous philosopher Aristotle talked about a pinhole image formation in his work. He wondered why "when light shines through a rectangular peep-hole, it appears circular in the form of a cone?" He didn't find an answer to his question and the problem wasn't answered until about 2,000 years later in the 1500s.

In the 1500s many artists, including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, used the "camera obscura" to help them draw pictures. A person or object would be outside the dark room and their image was reflected on a piece of paper and the artist would trace it.

This is a drawing of a camera obscura done in 1646, 102 years after the one above. This drawing shows an outer shell with lenses in the center of each wall and an inner shell with transparent paper for drawing. The artist needed to enter by a trap door in the bottom.

 

"View of Delft"

"The Girl With a Pearl Earring"

The camera obscura was used in the painting of this picture. It was painted about 1660 by Jan van der Meer van Delft. His paintings are known for their "camera-like" detail and quality - but were painted 150 years before the invention of the camera!

The camera obscura is believed to have been used in this painting by Jan van der Meer van Delft. He painted this in 1665. He was a great master who made paintings that to this day still amaze people with how much they look like a photograph.

The camera obscura was made portable by the 1700s by putting it in a box with a pinhole on one side and a glass screen on the other. Light coming through this pinhole projected an image onto the glass screen, where the artist could easily trace it by hand. Artists soon discovered that they could obtain an even sharper image by using a small lens in place of the pinhole.

One type of a portable camera obscura.

Another type of a "portable" camera obscura from 1769 drawing.

This is a drawing from 1855 showing an artist using a portable camera obscura that was easier to take places.

Extremely important to the invention of photography was knowledge of how sensitive to light certain materials were. More than 2,000 years before the invention of the camera obscura, the ancient Phoenicians (the first civilized nation in the world) knew that a certain snail left a yellow slime that turned purple in sunlight. In 1727 a German professor, Johann Heinrich Schulze, observed that silver salts darkened when exposed to light. But the idea of making pictures using this information did not occur to him. That invention required the talents of a later generation of scientists.

In 1800 a young English chemist, Thomas Wedgewood, was making "sun pictures" by placing leaves on leather that he had treated with silver salts, but he couldn't find a way to stop the darkening action of light and his leaf images faded into blackness. For the birth of photography to happen two key discoveries were still needed: a way to combine light-sensitive material with the camera obscura device and a way to make an image permanent.

Photography is Born!

"View from the Window at Le Gras, France"

The birth of photography happened in 1826 when a French scientist, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, put a plate coated with bitumen (an asphalt used in ancient times as a cement or mortar) in a camera obscura. He put the camera obscura facing his house for eight hours and made a photograph! It is the earliest camera photograph that we still have today. Here is a photograph of that first photograph!

Niepce began sharing his findings with Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, and artist who owned a theatre in Paris. They became partners three years later. Daguerre's most important discovery came in 1835, two years after Niepce died. Daguerre found that the chemical compound silver iodide was much more sensitive to light than Niepce's bitumen. He put a copper plate coated with silver iodide in a camera obscura, exposed this plate to light for a short time, then to fumes of mercury and an image appeared! One problem remained, the image darkened over time. Two years later he solved this problem by washing away remaining silver iodide with a solution of warm water and table salt.

Daguerre's process, which he named the daguerreotype, was announced to the world on January 7, 1839. Half a year later the French government gave Daguerre and Niepce's son, Isidore, lifetime pensions in exchange for all rights to their invention. The daguerreotype was to become France's gift to the world.

Here is one of the first daguerreotypes that was taken in 1839. It is a picture of Port Ripetta, Rome in Italy.

"I was first!"

Here is one of Talbot's early calotypes.

Three weeks after Daguerre's announcement an English amateur scientist, William Henry Fox Talbot, read about the daguerreotype and realized that this invention was a lot like his own unpublicized process that he called photogenic drawing. He quickly tried to claim priority over Daguerre and presented his process in a paper to the Royal Society in London, England.

In Talbot's process he first coated a sheet of drawing paper with the chemical compound silver chloride, then he put it in a camera obscura where it produced an image with the tones reversed (a negative). He then placed the negative against another coated sheet of paper to produce a positive image. Talbot did not find a way to make the image permanent until a month after Daguerre's announcement, but his process, later improved and renamed the calotype, is the basis for most modern film technology which relies on negatives to produce many positive prints.

Because of a few problems of Talbot's process, the daguerreotype was the method of photography that first took the world by storm. It became so popular that by the end of 1839 Paris newspapers were referring to a new disease call "Daguerreotypomania."

"Daguerreotypomania"

With improvements the daguerreotype quickly proved a great way to make portraits of people. One year after the daguerreotype was invented, daguerreotype studios throughout Europe and America were producing detailed likenesses. People gazed in amazement at their own image in these "mirrors with a memory."

This is a picture of one of the first commercially made daguerreotype cameras that was made in 1839. It was designed by Mr. Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype.

Another picture of a daguerreotype. Notice it is quite large.

Portrait of the photographer, Robert Cornelius. Daguerreotype of Samuel Morse

Photography Arrives in America!

Photography arrived in America because the man who invented the telepgraph system, Samual F. B. Morse, was so excited about it. He saw a demonstration of the daguerreotype in Paris and returned to America and spread the news. Daguerreotypes remained popular in America into the 1850's, long after European photographers had switched to the improved process developed from Talbot's positive/negative method.

Most pictures of the California Gold Rush of 1849 are daguerreotypes.

What was the most popular type of photographs taken in the 1800's? People. Photographic portraits were much less expensive than painted ones, they took less time and were more accurate. People who painted people's portraits quickly went out of business or became daguerreotypists themselves.

A daguerreotype portrait of the Adams family taken in 1846.

Another improvement...

In 1851 English photographer Frederick Scott Archer invented a wet-plate process called collodion. This was like Talbot's process but the negatives were made of smooth glass instead of paper. This produced sharper images and lasted longer than paper so it was easier to produce many paper prints from one glass negative.

A less expensive process was the tintype which used an iron plate instead of a glass plate. During the Civil War tintypes were the type of photography that was used the most. Tintype photographers often worked from the back of horse-drawn wagons photographing pioneer families and Union soldiers.

Army Post Office tent in Virginia during the Civil War. Collodian picture taken April 1863 by Timothy O'Sullivan.

Picture of a photographer's wagon during the Civil War in 1863 in Virgnia. Timothy O'Sullivan took this photograph.

Tintype of Civil War soldiers

Photograph of George Armstrong Custer (on right) and a Confederate prisoner during the Civil War.

"Meeting of the Rails" on May 10, 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah.

The Civil War in America was the first war to be thoroughly recorded by photography. American photographer Mathew Brady saw the importance of documenting the conflict at its beginning and organized a team of photographers to cover different battlefronts. They took 7,000 pictures!

Two of Mathew Brady's employees went on to become two of the best-known photographers of the American West, Timothy O'Sullivan and Andrew J. Russell. They produced large prints of spectacular land forms and people of the west. Other well known photographers are William Bell, John Hillers and William Henry Jackson.

Photographers hauled their large cameras, tripods and portable darkrooms all over the world. They photographed India, China and Japan. People were eager to see what these far off countries looked like.

In the 1800's industries hired photographers to photograph the great things they did like building ships, railroads, buildings and bridges. In Utah the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 was celebrated with a photograph of the two steam locomotives facing each other. This photograph was taken by Andrew J. Russell who had worked for Mathew Brady during the Civil War.

 

Kodak Cameras

An original Brownie camera from 1900.

George Eastman, was only 24 years old when he set up his Eastman Dry Plate Company in New York in 1880 and the first half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper. In 1888 he introduces the first Kodak camera that cost $25.00 (a great deal of money then). It had a 20 foot roll of paper, enough for 100 pictures already put in it. To get the film developed you had to return the camera to the Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. For $10.00 they would develop the photographs, put more film in your camera and mail everything back to you. One year later an improved Kodak camera with a roll of film instead of a 20 foot roll of paper appears.

Mr. Eastman wanted everybody to be able to take photographs. He worked hard to develop a camera that everybody could afford to buy. He did it in 1900! It was the Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera. It cost $1.00! Now everyone can take photographs, not just professional photographers.

 

 

Ad from 1900 for $1.00 Brownie Camera

Photograph taken with a Brownie camera. Notice how the photograph is round, just like the opening in the camera.

Color Photographs

People had tried to make color photographs since 1860. It wasn't until 1906 that a film sensitive to all colors called "panchromatic film" was produced. You had to take three separate negatives and then use a special viewer so you could see all three slides layed on top of each other.

The first color plates were invented in 1907 by Auguste and Louis Lumiere. They named it Autochrome. The colors appeared in delicate pastel.

An Autochrome picture of three French ladies. Look how the colors are very light.

The cameras that we have now use film with "sprockets" (holes along both sides of film). This film was developed in 1914 by Oscar Barnack.

You've heard of Kodachrome? It was the first color film that had more than one layer of film - it had many layers of film. Now you didn't need to take three separate photographs and put them on top of each other to get one color photograph, you could just take one photograph! Kodachrome was developed in 1936.

The first instant color film is developed in 1963 by Polaroid.

The disk camera is introduced in 1983 by Kodak.

The Photo CD is introduced in 1992 by Kodak.

Want to make your own camera?

You can make a pinhole camera like the kind first used in the 1850s. Pinhole cameras are a box that no light can get into except for a tiny hole on one end and film or photograhic paper on the other end. They are fairly easy to make and fun to take pictures with. Listed below are a few web sites with good information on how to make a pinhole camera.

This site tells you how to make a pinhole camera out of an oatmeal box and how to develop the pictures you take: users.rcn.com/stewoody/makecam.htm

If you make a pinhole camera and take pictures - send us your best pictures and we'll post it on the Kid's Page. Be sure to include your name, age and something about your pictures. E-mail to brrogers@utah.gov or mail to Kid's Page, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101.