Photography Timeline

Early Developments

• 1826: Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce takes the first permanent photograph, a landscape that required an eight-hour exposure.

Early Developments

• 1839: Louis Daguerre patents the daguerreotype.
• The image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor.
• The daguerreotype is a negative image, but the mirrored surface of the metal plate reflects the image and makes it appear positive in the proper light.

Early Developments

• 1839: William Fox Talbot of Great Britain invented the positive-negative process widely used in modern photography. He refers to this as photogenic drawing.
• 1851: Introduction of the collodion process.
• Allowed a negative for reproduction of prints.
• Cheaper, but process had to be finished quickly within about 10 minutes

Early Developments

• 1877: Eadweard Muybridge experiments with a series of photographs to record motion.

Rapid Developments

• 1888: Kodak box camera is mass marketed, becoming the first easy-to-use camera.
• 1891: Thomas Edison patents the kinetoscopic camera for motion pictures.
• 1923: Doc Harold Edgerton invents the xenon flash lamp and strobe photography.
• 1925: The Leica introduced the 35mm format to still photography.
• 1936: Development of Kodachrome multi-layered reversal color film.

Modern Developments

• 1948: Edwin H. Land introduces the first Polaroid instant image camera.
• 1957: First digital image produced on a computer at U.S. National Bureau of Standards (now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology).
• 1963: Kodak introduces the Instamatic.

Modern Developments

• 1973: Fairchild Semiconductor releases the first large image forming CCD chip.
• 1986: Kodak scientists invent the world's first megapixel sensor.
• A charge-coupled device (CCD) is a light-sensitive, integrated circuit that stores and displays the data for an image in such a way that each pixel (picture element) in the image is converted into an electrical charge the intensity of which is related to a color in the color spectrum.
• A separate value for each of more than 65,000 colors can be stored and recovered.