For centuries Chinese, Greek and Arabian astronomers used a technique of light passing through a pinhole to project images on to the wall of a darkened room for the purpose of looking at solar eclipses.
The camera obscura added a lens to this process which was later used by Renaissance Italian artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1490) to help them to draw perspective and proportions more accurately.
The challenge for scientists was to find a way to make the image permanent. This discovery was achieved both in France and England at about the same time. In 1826 French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce produced his first permanent image on a light-sensitive sheet of pewter, making it the oldest photograph in the world. Englishman, William Fox Talbot successfully produced a series of negative-positive images called collotypes, where by any number of copies could be made from an original negative.
Photography first became available to the public in Paris with the discovery of the daguerreotype, invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839. Images were made on copper plates coated with silver and treated with iodine and bromine vapours.
George Eastman of Kodak was responsible for making photography widely available to everyone by making cheap and easy to use photography. In 1900 he introduced the famous Box Brownie camera in the US. |
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