Although a number of the following pioneers of the technical photography process have already been reviewed in other chapters of the site, they are all extensively discussed in this chapter. Where they were only briefly portrayed in the other chapters, we give their life course and the influence they have had on the photographic process in a more extensive form. The order of the 30 pioneers I selected takes place chronologically based on their year of birth.
Let me tell you something – the first cameras weren’t cameras at all. They were projectors, of a sort.
This concept was mentioned as early as the 5th century BC, when a Chinese philosopher named ‘Mozi’ recorded the creation of an image from light rays passing through a small hole into a dark room. He called this darkened room a “collecting place” or the “locked treasure room”.
This effect was also mentioned by Greek philosopher, Aristotle, in “Problems”. This natural optical phenomenon later became known as ‘camera Obscura’ (Latin for “dark chamber”) or what we now refer to as a ‘pinhole image’.
The camera Obscura concept was thoroughly studied and documented in 1021AD by Arab physicist, Ibn Al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen. And that is the first pioneer to be discussed in this chapter.
The famous scientist Ibn al-Haytham is known for the earliest use of the camera Obscura. He was the first to demonstrate this with his lamp-experiment where several different light sources are arranged across a large area. He was thus the first to successfully project an entire image from outdoors onto a screen indoors with the camera Obscura. Ibn al-Haytham studied the camera Obscura and pinhole camera and wrote the Book of Optics.
Born over a thousand years ago in present day Iraq, Al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (known in the West by the Latinised form of his first name, initially “Alhacen” and later “Alhazen”) was a pioneering scientific thinker who made important contributions to the understanding of vision, optics and light. His methodology of investigation, in particular using experiment to verify theory, shows certain similarities to what later became known as the modern scientific method. Through his Book of Optics (Kitab al-Manazir) and its Latin translation (The Aspectibus), his ideas influenced European scholars including those of the European Renaissance. Today, many consider him a pivotal figure in the history of optics and the “Father of modern Optics”.
Ibn al-Haytham was born during a creative period known as the golden age of Muslim civilisation that saw many fascinating advances in science, technology and medicine. In an area that spread from Spain to China, inspirational men and women, of different faiths and cultures, built upon knowledge of ancient civilisations, making discoveries that had a huge and often underappreciated impact on our world.
Ibn al-Haytham was born in the year 965 in Basra, and died in about 1040 in Cairo. He was one of the earliest scientists to study the characteristics of light and the mechanism/process of vision. He sought experimental proof of his theories and ideas. During many years living in Egypt, ten of which were spent under what we may now call protective custody (house arrest), he composed one of his most celebrated works, the Kitab al-Manazir, whose title is commonly translated into English as Book of Optics but more properly has the broader meaning Book of Vision.
Ibn al-Haytham made significant advances in optics, mathematics and astronomy. His work on optics was characterised by a strong emphasis on carefully designed experiments to test theories and hypotheses. In that regard he was following a procedure somewhat similar to the one modern scientists adhere to in their investigative research.
Different views about how the process of vision could be explained had been in circulation for centuries mainly among classical Greek thinkers. Some said rays came out of the eyes, while others thought something entered the eyes to represent an object. But it was the 11th-century scientist Ibn al-Haytham who undertook a systematic critique of these ideas about vision in order to demonstrate by both reason and experiment that light was a crucial, and independent, part of the visual process. He thus concluded that vision would only take place when a light ray issued from a luminous source or was reflected from such a source before it entered the eye.
Ibn al-Haytham is credited with explaining the nature of light and vision, through using a dark chamber he called “Albeit Almuzlim”, which has the Latin translation as the “camera Obscura”; the device that forms the basis of photography.
Out of the 96 books he is recorded to have written; only 55 are known to have survived. Those related to the subject of light included: The Light of the Moon, The Light of the Stars, The Rainbow and the Halo, Spherical Burning Mirrors, Parabolic Burning Mirrors, The Burning Sphere, The Shape of the Eclipse, The Formation of Shadows, Discourse on Light, as well as his masterpiece, Book of Optics. Latin translations of some of his works are known to have influenced important Medieval and European Renaissance thinkers like Roger Bacon, René Descartes and Christian Huygens, who knew him as “Alhazen”.
And yet, some mysteries remain. Ibn al-Haytham affirmed that an optical illusion was the reason for the Moon appearing so big when it’s low in the sky close to the horizon in comparison to its size when at the zenith- and still no one knows why this happens. This, and other questions in science, has yet to be solved – leaving a legacy of intrigue for us to tackle today.
This simple structure is known as the “Saletta Negra”, ( literally dark hallway) Ponticello di Ludivico Sforza Il Moro, Castello Sforzsco was built on orders from Ludivico Sforza. The interior was originally painted all black. It is a design adapted from a Leonardo Da Vinci drawing of a building from 1490. Which has been downsized to be a natural light studio, with four large south facing windows. It was built by Leonardo Da Vinci to be his Camera Obscura studio.
In 1500 the Camera Obscura (Latin for dark room) had been in existence in some form for at least 400 years. There is a drawing, dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci; about this same period its use was an aid to drawing.
In his writings and drawings, Leonardo Da Vinci has been connected to the Camera Obscura, but now there’s evidence he used and invented the modern portable Camera Obscura.
Compare this detail of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing of an optical device, to what is supposed to be an 18th C. Camera Obscura. This unusual design, with a viewfinder, is unique to Camera Obscura’s. A similar idea is indicated Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing. This Italian made camera may have been Leonardo da Vinci’s actual Camera Obscura.
By the way: Johannes Kepler coined the phrase Camera Obscura in 1604. Kepler used the Camera Obscura for astronomical applications and created a portable version that he carried around with him as a tent for surveying Upper Austria.
Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. Possessing a brilliant mind, the Italian polymath contributed countless innovations that changed the world.
One of the fields that most intrigued Leonardo da Vinci was optics – the science behind how the human eye works. In his time, it was generally believed that the eye issued forth “sight rays” that would bounce off objects and then return to the eye, enabling the person to see.
Da Vinci believed this was wrong because it would take too long for such a ray to leave the eye, bounce off of something and then return to the eye.
To explain his dissent, he used the example of the sun. He said the sun was so far away that should a person need to send forth sight rays to see it, they would require a month to return. Though this estimate on the sun’s distance from the Earth was pretty far off (Da Vinci believed the sun was 4,000 miles away when, in reality, it’s about 93,000,000 miles (150 million kilometers).
The Camera Obscura, which translates to ‘dark chamber,’ was one of the most interesting optical inventions Leonardo worked with. He was not the first person to use one, but he was first to notice the similarity between the way a Camera Obscura worked and the way the human eye functioned.
A Camera Obscura is merely a dark box (or even a very dark room) with a tiny hole that admits light. Directly across from the hole, the image from the outside world is projected upside down onto a piece of light-sensitive material.
Da Vinci noticed that the Camera Obscura sees exactly the way the human eye sees: Light reflects off the surface of the object and travels through a small opening on the surface of the eye (your pupil), and the image ends up flipped upside down. Both the human eye and the Camera Obscura have openings, a biconvex lens that refracts light, and a surface (your retina) on which an image is created.
He wrote, “No image, even of the smallest object, enters the eye without being turned upside down.” But he couldn’t seem to figure out how a human eye actually sees the image right-side up. He didn’t know that the eye’s optic nerve transmits the image to the brain, which then flips it right-side up. So the only thing the Camera Obscura lacks is a brain to flip the image!
First edition of Barbaro’s important translation of the ten books of Architecture, with illustrations by Palladio.
Daniele Matteo Alvise Barbaro (also Barbarus) (8 February 1514 – 13 April 1570) was an Italian cleric and diplomat. He was also an architect, writer on architecture, and translator of, and commentator on, Vitruvius. Barbaro’s fame is chiefly due to his vast output in the arts, letters, and mathematics.
Similar to da Vinci, Daniele Barbaro was an Italian who encouraged the use of the Camera Obscura for artistic endeavours. By the time Barbaro adapted the technique, however, the chamber of the Camera Obscura was typically a simple box rather than an entire room.
Little has been established with certainty about the personal life of Barbaro. He is known, however, to have been born around 1514 in Venice and to have died in 1570.
Also, it may be assumed that the nobleman was well educated, since he is credited with translating ten books on architecture written by the celebrated Roman engineer Vitruvius and composed his own work La pratica della perspettiva (Practice of Perspective), which was published in 1568, which describes adding a diaphragm to the lens of a Camera Obscura to control both the amount of light passing through a lens and the depth of field.
An extremely influential work during the sixteenth century, Daniel Barbaro’s treatise on perspective includes the earliest known account of a lens being utilized with the Camera Obscura, bringing the device one step closer to the modern-day camera.
Note: in 1609, Johannes Kepler suggested the use of a lens to improve the image projected by a Camera Obscura.
The improvement in the image obtained with the device brought about by the inclusion of a lens as well as by adjusting the distance upon which the image is to be projected was described by Barbaro:
“Close all shutters and doors until no light enters the camera except through the lens, and opposite hold a piece of paper, which you move forward and backward until the scene appears in the sharpest detail. There on the paper you will see the whole view as it really is, with its distances, its colours and shadows and motion, the clouds, the water twinkling, the birds flying. By holding the paper steady you can trace the whole perspective with a pen, shade it and delicately colour it from nature.”
Also according to Barbaro, “You should choose the glass which does the best, and you should cover it so much that you leave a little in the middle clear and open and you will see a still brighter affect.”
The glass that reportedly worked best for Barbaro was a bi-convex lens taken from a pair of ordinary spectacles, though he also experimented with concave lenses with little success. By the eighteenth century, other pioneers in optics had improved the Camera Obscura to an even greater extent by using multiple lenses and mirrors to create brighter, erect images.
He promoted chemical remedies and observed that metals reacted differently with acids; that sulphur extracted something from the air in order to burn; that silver nitrate darkened on exposure to light; surmised the existence of elementary (atomic) particles; and described newly discovered compounds and methods of preparation. Sala’s discovery of light-sensitivity of silver was advanced by other chemists before photography was finally achieved in the 1830s.
One of Sala’s primary areas of study concerned chemical identity and change. Between 1612 and 1617 he worked in The Hague. His experiments at this time with silver nitrate and silver salts were an important step towards the invention of the photographic process; he introduced the alchemical name “magisterium argenti,” or “crystalli Dianae,” for silver nitrate, which he also called “lapis lunearis” and described in his Opera medica chimicae the smelting of silver nitrate.
In Septem planetarum terrestrium spagirica recensio (1614) he reported that “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
This discovery of the sun’s effect on powdered silver nitrate was not replicated by then “respected” scientists and was subsequently disregarded as having “no practical application,” despite the use of silver nitrate in the practice of alchemy. Robert Boyle made a similar observation later, but mistakenly believed that the darkening resulted from exposure to air, rather than light.
Johann Heinrich Schulze (12 May 1687 – 10 October 1744) was a German professor and polymath. Schulze studied medicine, chemistry, philosophy and theology and became a professor in Altdorf and Halle for anatomy and several other subjects.
Johann Heinrich Schulze grew up as a half-orphan and lived and learned in Halles orphan house, founded by August Hermann Francke. His goal was to make education accessible for everyone. The old buildings still exist and so does the idea of Francke through the work of the Franckesche Stiftung.
Schulze is best known for his discovery that the darkening in sunlight of various substances mixed with silver nitrate is due to the light, not the heat as other experimenters believed, and for using the phenomenon to temporarily capture shadows. Schulze’s experiments with silver nitrate were undertaken in about 1717. He found that slurry of chalk and nitric acid into which some silver had been dissolved was darkened by sunlight, but not by exposure to the heat from a fire, a phenomenon known since the 16th century and possibly earlier.
To provide an interesting demonstration of darkening by light, he applied stencils of words to a bottle filled with the mixture and put it in direct sunlight, which produced copies of the text in dark characters on the surface of the contents. The impressions persisted till shaking the bottle erased them or until overall exposure to light obliterated them.
Because they were produced by the action of light, an extremely broad and literal definition of what a photograph is may allow even these fluid, ephemeral sun printings to qualify as such, and on that basis many German sources credit Schulze as the inventor of photography.
Though Schulze’s work did not provide a means of permanently preserving an image, it did provide a foundation for later efforts toward that end. Thomas Wedgwood and Humphrey Davy produced more substantial but still impermanent shadow images on coated paper and leather around the year 1800.
Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in photographing camera images on paper coated with silver chloride in 1816 but he, too, could not make his results light-fast. Henry Fox Talbot made the first permanent camera photograph of this type in 1835.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele was born in 1742 in Stralsund, a small town on the Baltic coast (now part of Germany) that at the time was under Sweden’s jurisdiction. The son of a rather unsuccessful brewer and corn-chandler, young Carl developed a keen interest in chemistry and went on to become a good pharmacist. He used to work as an assistant in pharmacies and showed a talent in chemistry from a very young age.
In spite an offer made to him to study in London or Berlin, he operated a pharmacy in Köping where he spends the rest of his life and made all his important inventions.
Niépce’s house in Chalon-sur-Saône
The first photograph was taken in 1814 by the French multi-talented inventor Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris; the photograph though was not permanent and it faded.
Letters to his sister-in-law around 1816 indicate that Niépce had managed to capture small camera images on paper coated with silver chloride, making him apparently the first to have any success at all in such an attempt, but the results were negatives, dark where they should be light and vice versa, and he could find no way to stop them from darkening all over when brought into the light for viewing.
In 1826 Joseph Niépce set up a Camera Obscura in the window of his workroom in France, placed within it a polished plate coated with a sort of asphalt and uncapped the lens.
After a day-long exposure of eight hours, the plate was removed and the latent image was rendered visible by washing it with a mixture of lavender oil and white petroleum.
The result was the permanent direct positive picture of ’a view from nature’ as shown on the right. He called the result a “Heliogram” and became the first man ever to fix a print. But it would take 12 more years to reduce the exposure time to less than 30 minutes.
Niépce was born in Chalon-sur-Saône, Saône-et-Loire, where his father was a wealthy lawyer. His older brother Claude (1763–1828) was also his collaborator in research and invention, but died half-mad and destitute in England, having squandered the family wealth in pursuit of non-opportunities for the Pyréolophore. Niépce also had a sister and a younger brother, Bernard. Nicéphore was baptized Joseph but adopted the name Nicéphore, in honour of Saint Nicephorus the ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, while studying at the Oratorian college in Angers. At the college he learned science and the experimental method, rapidly achieving success and graduating to work as a professor of the college.
In 1795, he resigned as administrator of Nice to pursue scientific research with his brother Claude. One source reports his resignation to have been forced due to his unpopularity. In 1801 the brothers returned to the family’s estates in Chalon to continue their scientific research, and where they were united with their mother, their sister and their younger brother Bernard. Here they managed the family estate as independently wealthy gentlemen-farmers, raising beets and producing sugar.
Nicéphore Niépce died of a stroke on 5 July 1833, financially ruined such that his grave in the cemetery of Saint-Loup de Varennes was financed by the municipality. The cemetery is near the family house where he had experimented and had made the world’s first photographic image.
William Hyde Wollaston in his lab
William Hyde Wollaston (6 August 1766 – 22 December 1828) was an English chemist and physicist who is famous for discovering the chemical elements palladium and rhodium.
He was born in East Dirham in Norfolk, as the son of Francis Wollaston (1737–1815), a noted amateur astronomer, and his wife Althea Hyde. He was one of 17 children, but the family was financially well-off and he enjoyed an intellectually stimulating environment. He was educated privately. In 1793 he obtained his doctorate (MD) in medicine from Cambridge University, and was a Fellow of his college from 1787 to 1828.
During his studies, Wollaston had become interested in chemistry, crystallography, metallurgy and physics. In 1800, after he had received a large sum of money from one of his older brothers, he left medicine. He concentrated on pursuing his interests in chemistry and other subjects outside his trained vocation.
His optical work was important as well, where he is remembered for his observations of dark gaps in the solar spectrum (1802), a key event in the history of spectroscopy.
In 1806, Sir William Hyde Wollaston patented the Camera Lucida, which contained the Wollaston prism (the four-sided optics of which were first described basically by Keppler) – and brought life-drawing to a whole new level. Wollaston’s device was simple: a prism on an adjustable stand. When an artist looks down through the prism, they see the world in front of them, plus their hand on the page, combined in perfect superimposition.
By the mid-1800s, cameras Lucidas were everywhere. Indeed, the device is so effective in assisting accurate life-drawing that, according to the controversial Hockney-Falco Thesis, it’s now believed that many of the most admired drawings of the 19th Century, such as the Neoclassical portraits of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, could only have been made with a Camera Lucida. This becomes astonishingly clear if you try one—an experience we hope to share with as many people as possible.
In short, a camera Lucida allows you to trace what you see. And it does so in full daylight; there’s no need for a dark shroud or enclosure, as with a Camera Obscura. And that is the magic of the camera Lucida: it’s portable, easy to use, and – with a little practice – you just copy the world onto your page with a confident hand.
He also developed the first lens specifically for camera lens, called the meniscus lens, in 1812. The lens was designed to improve the image projected by the Camera Obscura. By changing the shape of the lens, Wollaston was able to project a flatter image, eliminating much of the distortion that was a problem with many of that day’s biconvex lenses.
Wollaston died in London 28 December 1828 and was buried in St Nicholas’s Churchyard in Chislehurst, England.
Vintage Camera Lucida
A Camera Lucida was an instrument consisting of an adjustable rod, which was attached to the drawing table with a clamp. A metal-encased prism was attached to the top. By adjusting this prism correctly, the scene or object was projected onto drawing paper in the desired dimensions. The image obtained was poor in light, and the camera lucida probably found little acceptance because of this. The device was mainly in circulation in the nineteenth century.
Brass Camera Lucida in carying case
Photography’s further metamorphosis owes a small debt to the butterfly. Thomas Wedgwood was an avid botanist. He collected specimens from across the natural spectrum, but was frustrated by their ephemeral quality. He wanted a permanent record of his collection.
In 1796 he unknowingly picked up where Scheele left off, and began experimenting with silver salts. Coating paper and leather with silver solution, he pressed leaves, fibers and butterfly wings against the sensitized surface. He named them “sun pictures“.
The resulting photograms were in one sense the world’s earliest photographic images.
Memorial to Thomas Wedgwood
Unfortunately, his sun pictures were far more delicate than even the most fragile butterfly wings. The images deteriorated rapidly, if displayed under light stronger than from candles and there was no known method of making the image permanent.
Working in vain with a variety of soaps and varnishes, Wedgwood abandoned his pursuit in 1802. Had Wedgwood known about Scheele’s research, he could have fixed his pictures with ammonia.
Sir Humphry Davy published a paper in the Journal of the Royal Institution, London, in June 1802, on the experiments of his friend Wedgwood; this was the first account of an attempt to produce photographs.
Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce functionally invented photography as we know it. Niépce created the process of Heliography, which he used to create View from the Window at Le Gras, the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene.
Daguerre began his carrier as an architect, then moved on to painting and became a successful commercial artist by inventing diorama. He used a Camera Obscura as a helping tool for his painting and became persistent on finding a chemical, easy way to record images.
In 1826 he became aware about Niepce’s experiments and signed a contractual agreement with him in 1829. The two developed the physautotype method, which used lavender oil.
After Niépce’s death in 1833, Daguerre developed an even faster process, in which an iodized silver plate was exposed to light, ’developed’ in warm mercury fumes, and “fixed” with a solution of sodium thiosulfate.
His discovery was made by an accident, according to the writer Robert Leggat, who said Daguerre put an exposed plate in a chemical cupboard in 1835 only to later find it have developed a latent image due to the mercury of a broken thermometer. He was able to fixate the image permanent by immersing it in salt.
That process, Daguerreotype, bears his name. Daguerre now had a complete process that produced unique positive images in a few minutes with the Camera Obscura on silver-plated copper.
The image was unique because there was no negative but only the plate that was used in the camera. Enlargings or more than one print of the image were impossible.
The Daguerreotype process was unveiled at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in August 1839. The French government adopted Daguerreotype and “donated” the method to the whole world and Daguerre became famous and rich. It became the first commercially successful was of getting permanent images from a camera. Daguerreotypes were popular until the mid 1850s.
Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 3rd arrondissement, a street scene captured in a Daguerreotype in either 1838 or 1839, and believed to be the earliest photograph showing a living person. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure time was at least 10 minutes, the moving traffic left no trace. The two men near the bottom left corner, one apparently having his boots polished by the other, stayed in one place long enough to be visible. It is also thought that just to the right of the two men, another person can be seen, sitting on a bench and reading a paper 184 years ago.
He alone could have offered all that was needed for the invention of photography but this multi talented scientist needed it much less than all the others. He had many talents including drawing very well.
In 1819 he had already discovered the ability that “hypo” had to fix the photographic images and he is the one who solved the “fixing” problem of pictures that his friend Talbot had. He informed Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery that this “hypo” could be used as a photographic fixer, to “fix” pictures and make them permanent, after experimentally applying it thus in early 1839.
He was the one who first used the terms “photograhy” “negative” positive” and “snapshot”. In 1839, he made a photograph on glass, which still exists, and experimented with color reproduction.
Herschel’s first glass-plate photograph, dated 9 September 1839, showing the mount of his father’s 40-foot telescope.
One of the oldest and longest surviving photographic processes, the Cyanotype or blue-print was also invented by Sir John in 1840, using a mixture of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide to produce a light sensitive paper.
As a relatively simple process to prepare and manipulate – it required no development or fixing other than washing – it was popular among amateurs throughout the nineteenth century and has also been widely used by engineers and architects for reproducing technical drawings (‘blueprints’).
His contact with other important scientists of his time in Europe and his new ideas in many scientific fields made him without a doubt the leading figure in the English scientific community.
Anna Atkins can be considered as the first woman photographer. She studied botanology in a period when access to science and studies for women was almost impossible.
In 1841 she came into contact with Fox Talbot who was a friend of her father’s. Immediately she became aware of the possibilities that photography could offer to scientific research.
She worked with the procedure of Cyanotype; a technique which was just discovered by Herschel and seemed much easier to her.
Because of the stability of Cyanotype many of her pictures still exist to this very day. In October 1843 she published the first book containing photographs which was named “British Algae – Cyanotype impressions” which was completed in a period of 10 years and came before Talbot’s publication “The pencil of nature”
Victorian photographer Anna Atkins was being celebrated in dual exhibitions at The New York Public Library. Historically, Anna is of great significance as she was one of the first female photographers. Anna used a special blue-printing technique in her photography, called cyanotypes.
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Open Door, 1844 -46, salt print from calotype negative (using paper coated with silver iodide). An artistic composition: Talbot wrote of it: “We have a sufficient authority in the Dutch school of art for taking as subjects of representation scenes of daily and familiar occurrence. A painter’s eye will often be arrested when ordinary people see nothing remarkable. ”
Professor of literature, Egyptologist, mathematician, classicist, physicist, transcriber of Chaldean cuneiform texts, who with his inventions on photography created the foundations for the development of this art and science for the next one hundred and fifty years.
After a trip to Italy, where he used a Camera Lucida for complicated designs, he decided to discover a more practical and easy way to record images. He succeeded quite early, in 1835 by creating the first negative. His greatest discovery the negative process minimizes exposure time considerably to exposure times of images to less than 1 minute. He named this method Calotype.
This Calotype process created a paper negative which could be transferred as positive prints, multiple times, also on paper. It was a relatively simple and economical process and produced pleasing print tones. Even though the Daguerreotype enjoyed more success during the early days of photography, the Fox Talbot’s Calotype process was the true fore runner of today’s modern photography.
With the help and guidance of his friend Herschel he achieved extraordinary results, which were announced on January 1839 at the Royal Society and since then English and French argue on who first announced the discovery of photography.
Talbot’s printing establishment was set up in Reading, about 40 miles west of London, in 1844, to enable him to make large quantities of salt prints. These were required for his book, The Pencil of Nature, which was the first book to be illustrated with photographs, these being tipped into copies of the book by hand.
Our culture of point-and-shoot portrait photography has roots reaching back to 1840, when Joseph Petzval introduced a lens design that could gather more than 20 times as much light as lenses used in previous cameras.
This meant that photos that had previously required 10-minute exposure times could now be taken in 30 seconds or less. A glimpse of a person’s gaze could be captured forever, and the age of photographed life had truly begun.
Born in Hungary (in a region that is now part of Slovakia) on January 6, 1807, Joseph Petzval came from a talented family. His father was a music teacher and composer who held two patents for mechanical designs. Young Petzval earned degrees in engineering and mathematics at the Institutum Geometricum in Buda, where he was employed by the city government as a civil engineer.
In 1837, Petzval was appointed chair of mathematics at the prestigious University of Vienna. Even as he taught algebra and pursued theoretical research in optics, he founded a workshop where he could refine his practical lens-making skills.
It was here, in 1840, that Petzval developed and optimized his portrait objective lens design. The Petzval lens could produce clear images from much shorter exposure times than the lenses used in Louis Daguerre’s pioneering camera of 1839. The lens, with the widest relative aperture of any then made (about f/3), was very successful for its intended purpose: the making of Daguerreotype portraits. With the faster Collodion (wet plate) process developed in the 1850s, a camera equipped with this lens could take one- to two-minute indoor portraits.
To help perform the mathematical labour for his lens design project, Petzval brought in a team of Austrian army artillery officers. They had been trained to calculate trajectories for cannonballs; such advanced math skills were rare 180+ years ago! Along with his revolutionary portrait objective lens, Joseph Petzval designed opera glasses, binoculars, projectors, and other optical instruments. These achievements were founded on his ground-breaking theoretical work. In an era when optical devices were typically refined through experience and intuition, Vienna-based Petzval (a trained mathematician) optimized his designs with computational analysis.
Also in 1840, manufacturer Peter Wilhelm Friedrich von Voigtländer paid 2000 guldens to Petzval for the right to produce his lenses commercially. It was an arrangement that Petzval would come to regret. Voigtländer would make a fortune by selling thousands of Petzval lens cameras, but Petzval himself received no further compensation.
Despite this frustration, he continued pursuing both practical and theoretical research into optical systems and phenomena. Petzval’s Portrait was illegally copied by every lens maker, and Petzval had a nasty falling out with Peter Voigtländer over unpaid royalties.
A 150mm Petzval lens was fitted to a conical metal Voigtländer camera taking circular Daguerreotypes in 1841. The Voigtländer-Petzval was the first camera and lens specifically designed to take photographs, instead of being simply a modified artist’s Camera Obscura. The Petzval Portrait was the dominant portrait lens for nearly a century. The Petzval Portrait remains popular as a projection lens where the narrow angles involved mean the field curvature is not significant.
Sadly, Petzval’s home was robbed in 1859, and much of his work, including a draft manuscript of an optics textbook, was destroyed. He continued teaching until 1877, after which he lived reclusively and died as an embittered old man in 1891.
Hippolyte Bayard was a French photographer and the most unfortunate pioneer in the history of photography. He invented his own process that produced direct positive paper prints in the camera and presented the world’s first public exhibition of photographs on 24 June 1839 (for humanitarian reasons). Bayard was also the first who combined two negatives to create one print (called Combination Printing).
As a civil servant and with five hundred franks that he received as financial help from Dominique François Jean Arago for improving his process, prevented him from presenting the discovery of photography at the French Academy of Sciences.
Afterwards he claimed to have invented photography earlier than Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre in France and William Henry Fox Talbot in England, the men traditionally credited with its invention.
An Englishman named Frederick Scott Archer and a Frenchman named Gustave Le Gray are said to have almost simultaneously invented the Collodion process, or “Collodian wet plate process”, in 1851.
The plates used an emulsion process instead of a simple coating, resulting in a much faster exposure time of only a few seconds. The Collodion plates were required to be coated, sensitised and developed all within the span of fifteen minutes, necessitating the use of a portable dark room. The most common emulsion plates were ambrotype, which were made on glass plates, and tintype, which were made on tin plates.
Kenilworth Castle, Ante-Room, Great Hall, by Frederick Scott Archer
(Collodion, Date 18 January 1855)
Archer was born in Hertford, Hertfordshire, in 1814. His mother died in 1817 when he was two years old. His father was a prominent local farmer who became the town’s mayor in 1818. As a young boy, Archer was apprenticed to a bullion dealer and silversmith in London. He later turned his attention to portrait sculpture and took up photography in 1847 to assist with his sculpting.
Archer used Talbot’s Calotype process which produced paper negatives but, dissatisfied with the results, he soon began his own experiments to develop a more sensitive and finely detailed process. For his experiments Archer used collodion—a newly discovered substance that was used as a medical dressing. Collodion, which is a sticky solution of gun cotton in ether, dries quickly to produce a tough, transparent, waterproof film.
The process he discovered was to coat a glass plate with collodion mixed with potassium iodide and then immerse the plate in a sensitising solution of silver nitrate. Exposed in the camera while still wet, the plate was then developed and fixed immediately. Crisp, detailed negatives were produced by exposures of only a few seconds. Initially the process was called ‘the Archertype’, but later on it was commonly known as the wet-collodion process. Archer’s process was to dominate photography for the next thirty years.
In 1851, Archer published his results in the journal The Chemist, where he gave full and detailed instructions on the process. Had Archer been motivated purely by personal gain, he could have patented his invention. His friends certainly encouraged him to do so. As it was, however, he gave his invention freely to the world where others soon enthusiastically took it up.
Frederick Scott Archer’s wet-collodion camera, 1853 © The Royal Photographic Society Collection
Archer was interested in camera design as well as photographic chemistry. In April 1853, he demonstrated a camera made to his own design at a meeting of the Photographic Society.
Archer’s camera, ‘where the whole process of a negative picture is completed within the box itself’, was in fact also a portable darkroom. At the back of the camera were two black velvet sleeves, through which the photographer could put his hands to manipulate the glass plate—sensitising, developing and fixing it.
An amber window allowed the photographer to see what he was doing. Trays and bottles of chemicals were stored inside the camera. When folded for carrying, the camera was very compact, measuring only about 30,5 x 30,5 x 46cm. Folding collodion cameras based on Archer’s design were made and sold by Thomas Ottewill & Co from 1854.
Others were to benefit from Archer’s work and, indeed, a lucky few were to make their fortunes. Archer himself, however, was not so fortunate. His easy-going, generous nature, combined with poor health, prevented him from aggressively pursuing the financial rewards that were rightly his.
In May 1857 Archer died, practically penniless, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London.
His family were awarded a government pension of £50 per annum ‘in consideration of the scientific discoveries of their father’ and members of the Photographic Society contributed £767 in recognition that he was: ‘the true architect of all those princely fortunes which are being acquired by the use of his ideas and inventions’.
Sadly, Archer’s wife, Fanny, died a few months’ later, leaving three orphaned children. Of these, only one, Alice, survived to adulthood.
Frederick Scott Archer made what is undoubtedly one of the most important contributions to the progress of photography during the 19th century: the discovery of the wet-collodion process. Archer’s process was far superior to any then in existence and which soon superseded all other methods. Many of the photographs from the American Civil War were taken on emulsion plates, with photographers carrying around their portable darkrooms around the fields.
Today, compared to his contemporaries, Fox Talbot and Daguerre, he is little remembered for his pioneering photographic work.
A view on the Thames,1855
The wet emulsion plate process was a revolutionary discovery. However, the process was still not ideal because the plates had to be sensitised, exposed while still wet and processed immediately after.
Richard Leach Maddox, an English physician and photomicrography, noticed that the ether vapour from the wet plates was beginning to affect his health. He began searching for an alternative and in 1871, discovered a new process, which he named the ‘dry plate’. Also known as the ‘gelatine process’, this technique radically changed photography once again.
By sensitising cadmium bromide and silver nitrate coated on a glass plate in a gelatine coating, the plates could be stored and used when needed, rather than being prepared as they were needed like the wet plates. This marked the dawn of a new era for photography. Improvements were rapidly made, decreasing exposure times so that cameras could be handheld.
1871 – Richard Leach Maddox creates the gelatin emulsion. This is also called silver-gelatin photography which uses silver halide crystals that could be found in gelatin. (above is a photo which uses silver-gelatine photography)
Dry plates had been tried before: and had no effect. Silver nitrate with a binder of albumen – derived from egg white, and widely used in printing-out paper in the nineteenth century – had been coated on glass; but these proved to be too insensitive for camera use. Gelatin had also been suggested by photo-theorist and colour pioneer Thomas Sutton, and the substance would also have been known to Maddox – himself an eminent microscope practitioner – through its use as a holding/preserving base used in microscope slides. Finally, he tried gelatin from a packet of Nelson’s Gelatine Granuals.
Maddox prepared a number of plates, exposing by contact-printing them from other negatives, and putting each through a different exposure trial.
Who was Richard Leach Maddox?
Richard Leach Maddox (4 August 1816 – 11 May 1902) was an English photographer and physician who invented lightweight gelatin negative dry plates for photography in 1871. Richard Leach Maddox was born at Bath, England, on 4 August 1816. Long before his discovery of the dry gelatin photographic emulsion, Maddox was prominent in what was called photomicrography – photographing minute organisms under the microscope.
Maddox and his first wife, Amelia, were married in Constantinople in 1849. They lived from circa 1860 in the Woolston area of Southampton – an area where many medical men were located, due to the vicinity of the recently built military hospital at Netley. Amelia died in 1871.
The resulting prints were very delicate in detail, of a colour varying between a bistre and olive tint, and after washing dried to a brilliant surface.
The advantages of the dry plate were obvious: photographers could use commercial dry plates off the shelf instead of having to prepare their own emulsions in a mobile darkroom. Negatives did not have to be developed immediately.
Also, for the first time, cameras could be made small enough to be hand-held, or even concealed: further research created ‘fast’ exposure times, which led to ‘snapshot’ photography (and the ‘Kodak’ camera with roll film), ultimately paving the way for cinematography.
In 1875, Maddox married his second wife, Agnes. In this same year they left for Corsica, and then lived for a time in Bordighera. Maddox’s son by this marriage, Walter, was born in Southampton in 1880. Prior to that date, the Maddoxes were living at Gunnersbury, London.
Richard Maddox’s later years were marred by poverty and ill health. From 1886, Maddox lived (according to his daughter) in “a most retired manner” at the house called ‘Greenbank’ in Portswood, Southampton, dying there on 11 May 1902.
The “lavishly furnished” studio of Gustave Le Gray
An Englishman named Frederick Scott Archer and a Frenchman named Gustave Le Gray are said to have almost simultaneously invented the collodion process, or “collodian wet plate process”, in 1851.
Jean-Baptiste Gustave Le Gray (30 August 1820 – 30 July 1884) was a French painter, draughtsman, sculptor, print-maker, and photographer. He has been called “the most important French photographer of the nineteenth century” because of his technical innovations, his instruction of other noted photographers, and “the extraordinary imagination he brought to picture making.” He was an important contributor to the development of the wax paper negative.
Gustave Le Gray was born on 30 August 1820 in Villiers-le-Bel, Val-d’Oise. He was an only child, and his parents encouraged him to become a solicitor’s clerk, but from a young age, he aspired to be an artist.
He was originally trained as a painter, studying under François-Édouard Picot and Paul Delaroche. His parents financed a trip to Switzerland and Italy so that he could study art abroad, and he lived in Italy between 1843-1846 and painted portraits and scenes of the countryside. In 1844, he met and married Palmira Maddalena Gertrude Leonardi (born 23 March 1823), a laundress who he had six children with, although only two survived into adulthood.
Le Gray exhibited his paintings at the salon in 1848 and 1853. He then crossed over to photography in the early years of its development. He made his first Daguerreotypes by 1847. His early photographs included portraits; scenes of nature such as Fontainebleau Forest; and buildings such as châteaux of the Loire Valley.
In 1855, Le Gray opened a “lavishly furnished” studio. At that time, becoming progressively the official photographer of Napoleon III, he became a successful portraitist. His most famous work dates from this period, 1856 to 1858, especially his seascapes. The studio was a fancy place, but in spite of his artistic success, his business was a financial failure: the business was poorly managed and ran into debts. He therefore “closed his studio, abandoned his wife and children, and fled the country to escape his creditors.”
His technical innovations included:
- Improvements on paper negatives, specifically waxing them before exposure “making the paper more receptive to fine detail”.
- A collodion process published in 1850 but which was “theoretical at best”. The invention of the wet collodion method to produce a negative on a glass plate is now credited to Frederick Scott Archer who published his process in 1851.
- Combination printing, creating seascapes by using one negative for the water and one negative for the sky.
In October 1999, Sotheby’s sold a Le Gray albumen print “Beech Tree, Fontainebleau” for £419,500, which was a world record for the most expensive single photograph ever sold at auction, to an anonymous buyer.
Hollow oak tree in the wood of Fontainebleau
Goodwin’s living quarters in the Plume House parsonage of the House of Prayer Church in Newark
Hannibal Williston Goodwin (April 21, 1822 – December 31, 1900), patented a method for making transparent, flexible roll film out of nitrocellulose film base, which was used in Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, an early machine for viewing motion pictures.
Goodwin was born on April 21, 1822 in Ulysses, New York and was raised on a farm. He began taking college classes at Yale Law School in 1844, then Wesleyan University, and finally earned his degree in 1848 at Union College. Goodwin began studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York City to become an Episcopal preacher.
After taking positions in Bordentown, Newark, and Trenton in New Jersey, he went to California to recover his health from a bronchial complaint. In 1867, Goodwin came back to New Jersey settled down as the fifth rector of the House of Prayer Church in Newark, where he would serve the next twenty years.
Goodwin was motivated to search for a non-breakable, and clear substance on which he could place the images he utilized in his Biblical teachings. He set up a chemistry lab in the attic of the Plum house rectory and sawed a five foot hole in the roof for better sunlight.
Goodwin made his flexible photographic film by dissolving nitrocellulose in nitro-benzole and then diluting the thick mixture with alcohol. He poured the mixture onto glass, and when the nitro-benzole and alcohol evaporated, he had a film that could be coated with emulsion and used for taking pictures.
On May 2, 1887, the year Goodwin retired from the church he had served for twenty years, he filed a patent for “a photographic pellicle and process of producing same … especially in connection with roller cameras”, but the patent was not granted until 13 September 1898. In the meantime, George Eastman had already started production of roll-film using his own process.
In 1900, Goodwin set up the Goodwin Film and Camera Company, but before film production had started he was involved in a street accident near a construction site and died from a broken leg and Pneumonia on December 31, 1900.
Goodwin’s patent was sold to Ansco who successfully sued Eastman Kodak for infringement of the patent and was awarded $5 million (over $120 million in 2020) on March 10, 1914.
The Newark International Film Festival named one of their main awards the Hannibal Goodwin Award for Innovation in Filmmaking
Muybridge’s show of moving picture was featured on the cover of The Illustrated London News dated Saturday, May 25, 1882.
Eadweard Muybridge (9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904, born Edward James Muggeridge) was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.
He adopted the first name “Eadweard” as the original Anglo-Saxon form of “Edward”, and the surname “Muybridge”, believing it to be similarly archaic. He immigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous.
Born in Kingston upon Thames, England, at the age of 20 he emigrated to the United States as a bookseller, first to New York City, and eventually to San Francisco. In 1860, he planned a return trip to Europe, and suffered serious head injuries in a stagecoach crash in Texas en route.
He spent the next few years recuperating in Kingston upon Thames, where he took up professional photography, learned the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He returned to San Francisco in 1867, a man with a markedly changed personality. In 1868, he exhibited large photographs of Yosemite Valley, and began selling popular stereographs of his work.
Muybridge’s experiments in photographing motion began in 1872, when the railroad magnate Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter.
The zoopraxiscope-Horse galloping; images on a disc which when spun gives the illusion of a man riding a galloping horse, c1893.
The project was then interrupted while Muybridge was being tried for the murder of his wife’s lover. Although he was acquitted, he found it expedient to travel for a number of years in Mexico and Central America, making publicity photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, a company owned by Stanford.
In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery of from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2/1000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results and proved Stanford’s contention.
The results of Muybridge’s work were widely published, most often in the form of line drawings taken from his photographs. They were criticized, however, by those who thought that horse’s legs could never assume such unlikely positions. To counter such criticism, Muybridge gave lectures on animal locomotion throughout the United States and Europe.
These lectures were illustrated with a zoopraxiscope, a lantern he developed that projected images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving pictures. The zoopraxiscope display, an important predecessor of the modern cinema, was a sensation at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.
Muybridge made his most important photographic studies of motion from 1884 to 1887 under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. These consisted of photographs of various activities of human figures, clothed and naked, which were to form a visual compendium of human movements for the use of artists and scientists.
Eadweard Muybridge, Human and Animal Locomotion, Plate 626, photographs taken between 1878 and 1887.
Woman Jumping, Running Straight High Jump: Plate 156 from Animal Locomotion (1887) 1884-86.
Many of these photographs were published in 1887 in the portfolio Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. Muybridge continued to publicize and publish his work until 1900, when he retired to his birthplace.
Eastman and businessman Henry Strong form a partnership called the Eastman Dry Plate Company. This is their factory in 1881.
Eastman was born in Waterville, New York, as the youngest child of George Washington Eastman and Maria Eastman (née Kilbourn), at the 10-acre (4.0 ha) farm, which his parents had bought in 1849. He had two older sisters, Ellen Maria and Katie.
He was largely self-educated, although he attended a private school in Rochester after the age of eight. In the early 1840s his father had started a business school, the Eastman Commercial College in Rochester, New York. The city became one of the first “boomtowns” in the United States, based on rapid industrialization.
As his father’s health started deteriorating, the family gave up the farm and moved to Rochester in 1860. His father died of a brain disorder on April 27, 1862. To survive and afford George’s schooling, his mother took in boarders.
The second daughter, Katie, had contracted polio when young and died in late 1870 when George was 15 years old. The young George left school early and started working to help support the family.
When George Eastman quit his school to start work as an office boy in 1868 in an insurance company at $3 a week he was fourteen years old. And when Eastman quit his job at Rochester Saving Bank 13 years later in 1881 he was getting $1400 a year.
He worked at the bank during the day and experimented at home in his mother’s kitchen at night. His mother said that some nights Eastman was so tired he couldn’t undress, but slept on a blanket on the floor beside the kitchen stove.
After three years of photographic experiments, Eastman had a formula that worked. By 1880, he had not only invented a dry plate formula, but had patented a machine for preparing large numbers of the plates. He purchased his first camera in 1877, it cost him $49.58 and he had to pay additional $5 for lessons. With tent-load of equipment carry and knowledge of tedious film development procedure, photography was either a professional business or at least a serious hobby.
George Eastman’s invention of a dry-plate process improved the robustness of photographs, which he then built further on by developing a Gelatin emulsion that was applied to paper, then removed and varnished with collodion after exposure.
This film, which was carried in rolls, was easier to transport than plates and allowed for multiple exposures without fully reloading a camera. Eastman’s crowning achievement was the compact, handheld Kodak camera.
George Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak Company and invented the rollfilm. The first rollfilm, introduced in 1884, was made out of paper and sensitized with a Gelatine emulsion.
Displayed is Kodak’s transparent, flexible, unbreakable film that was introduced with the Kodak camera in1888 which provided 100 exposures.
Initially, Eastman and co concentrated on developing and patenting what they viewed as the three basic elements of photography: the film, the process of filmmaking and the roll holder. Until 1887 or 1888, Eastman and his employees were working so intensely, especially on the delicate problems involved in the preparation of emulsions for coating plates or film that there was no time for the big picture. Eastman pushed his colleagues with such forcefulness that a rather large number of them collapsed under strain. What happened next is no less than a “paradigm shift”.
Eastman began working on a simple camera, which targeted mass market in the summer of 1887. By December, his ‘little Roll-Holder Breast Camera’ was ready for a name. He called it Kodak.
He wanted a brand-new unique word in order to meet the trademark requirements in England; and he also wanted a word easy to pronounce. Including the case in which it was sold, the new Kodak was 6.5 inches by 3.25 inches by 3.75 inches. Price: $25.
And Eastman wasn’t just selling the camera. He was selling a service as well. The $25 camera came loaded with a roll of one hundred frames of unexposed film. Taking the photograph was as easy as pushing a button and turning the key for the next frame. When all one hundred frames had been exposed, the photographer sent the camera back to Rochester when Eastman Kodak Company unloaded it, developed pictures, reloaded the camera and sent the pictures and the camera back to the customer. Price for this service: $10.
George Eastman sitting at his desk, reading a memo.
Eastman created a unique customer experience and associated it with a brand name called “Kodak”. In fact, Kodak later launched a brand campaign: “You press the button, we do the rest”. Not every problem needs a technical solution; something Thomas Alva Edison never understood.
Kodak never stopped filing patents; in fact he developed a strong relationship with MIT, which ensured a stream of talent kept coming to Kodak. By 1900, Eastman brought out a more compact version called Brownie. It was a leatherette covered card box with a wooden film carrier. The original had no finder but did have V sighting lines on top.
It was selling for $1.00 with roll of film for an additional $0.15. This camera is considered by many experts to be the most important camera ever manufactured. The reason is that it was produced so cheaply that anyone, not just professionals or people of means, could own it. Because it was so simple to use, anyone could operate it right out of the box. Kodak was to sell millions of them.
George Eastman, American innovator and the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, was dying. An illness of the spine was killing him, causing great pain and leaving him unable to move properly. Haunted by the pain his mother went through in her final years over twenty years prior.
Eastman was driven into a state of depression, until, eventually, he was forced into taking drastic action to end it. On March 14th 1943, Eastman shot himself through the heart, but not before leaving a note behind. ‘To my friends and family,’ it read, ‘my work is done – why wait?’
Kodak employees at the assembly line
Early Kodak ad featuring a girl with the Brownie box camera.
Lumière Cinematographe, 1895
Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière (19 October 1862 – 10 April 1954) was a French engineer, industrialist, biologist, and illusionist. He attended the Martinière Technical School and worked as a manager at the photographic company of his father, Claude-Antoine Lumière.
He was invited to attend a demonstration of the Kinetoscope invented by Thomas Edison, which inspired his and his brother’s work on the cinematograph. During 1894–1895, he and his brother Louis invented an animated photographic camera and projection device, the cinematograph, which met with worldwide success.
Although it is his brother Louis Lumière who is generally acclaimed as the “father of the cinema”, Auguste Lumière also made a major contribution towards the development of the medium, first by helping with the invention and construction of the cinematographe (the world’s first camera and projection mechanism), and second by appearing as a subject in many of the films shot by Louis (thus unwittingly becoming one of the first film “stars”).
However, according to Louis, Auguste lost interest in the cinematographe as soon as construction had been completed, and thereafter showed no further interest in the film medium. Auguste was sceptical of the potential of the device, remarking “My invention can be exploited… as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever”.
After his work on the cinematograph Lumière began focusing on the biomedical field, becoming a pioneer in the use of X-rays to examine fractures. He also contributed to innovations in military aircraft, producing a catalytic heater to allow cold-weather engine starts. He died in Lyon, aged 91.
Trivia
- Along with his brother, Louis Lumière, he is credited with giving the world’s first public film screening on December 28, 1895.
- The two brothers opened a Photorama at 18 rue de Clichy, Paris (15th January 1902). This new panoramic cinema replaced the old Pole Nord cinema.
- Co-founded, with brother Louis Lumière, the production/distribution company Société Lumière in 1895 in France.
- Auguste also had medical interests and published research in cancer and tuberculosis.
- Louis and Auguste’s father was photographer and painter Antoine Lumière. He had a photography studio at Besançon and would later sent his two sons to the technical school in Lyon. Then they worked together to obtain a “blue label” dry photographic plate that made a fortune.
Auguste Lumière was posthumously awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6320 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on February 8, 1960.
Auguste Lumière in his office
Louis Jean Lumière (5 October 1864 Besançon – 6 June 1948, Bandol) was a French engineer and industrialist who played a key role in the development of photography and cinema. Louis Lumière was one of four children of Claude-Antoine Lumière, a photographer and painter, and his wife Jeanne-Joséphine (née Costille). At the Martinière Technical School he gained highest marks in his class.
At age 17, Lumière invented a new process for film development using a dry plate. This process was significantly successful for the family business, permitting the opening of a new factory with an eventual production of 15 million plates per year. Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope inspired his and his brother’s subsequent work on the cinematograph.
Louis Lumière is most often associated with the name of his brother, Auguste Lumière, under the name of the Lumière brothers. This comparison is a little excessive with regard to the invention of the cinematograph, since in reality, Auguste failed in his attempt to manufacture the first machine, and passed it to his brother who made the invention succeed.
On the other hand, Louis was the director of all the first animated photographic views of the Lumière Society, which Auguste sometimes attended only as an amateur actor (Le Repas de bébé, La Pêche aux poissons rouges, Démolition d’un mur, etc.). But the contract signed between the two brothers provided that they be systematically associated, both morally and financially, in all their work and discoveries.
Although no one will ever come up with a definitive answer as to who invented the cinema (probably because no one single person was responsible), Louis Lumière has one of the strongest claims to the title – for it was he (with his brother Auguste) who invented the cinematographe: a machine that combined the functions of camera and projector and was thus able to project films onto a screen to an audience.
The invention was patented on February 13 1895, and a programme of short films directed and photographed by Louis was first unveiled to the general public on 28 December 1895 – a date that many historians claim to be the birth-date of the cinema as we know it.
The cinematographe was an immediate hit, and its influence was colossal -within just two years, the Lumière catalogue included well over a thousand films, all of them single-shot efforts running under a minute, and many photographed by cameramen sent to various exotic locations.
Although Lumière also staged some fictive scenes, the bulk of the work bearing his name would nowadays be described as documentary reportage. In common with many cinema pioneers, he perversely saw no future for the medium, and retired in 1900 to make still photographic equipment – the field in which he originally made his reputation.
The Lumière freres’ cinematographer was not their only invention. Mainly Louis is also credited with the birth of color photograph, the Autochromes, using a single exposure trichromic basis (instead of a long three-step exposure): a glass plaque is varnished and embedded with potato starch tinted in the three basic colors (rouge-orange, green and violet-blue), vegetal coal dust to fill the interstices and a black-and-white photographic emulsion layer to capture light.
They were the main and more successful procedure for obtaining color photographs from 1903 to 1935, when Kodachrome, then Agfacolor and other less fragile film based procedures took over. An Autochrome is positivated from the same plaque, so they are unique images with a soft toned palette.
Auguste & Louis Lumière together in the lab
Drawings by Poyet of the Lumiere Cinematographe Camera and film magazine, ca. 1895.
Barnack was an engineer at the Leitz company, Germany and suffered from asthma, so he proposed reducing the size and weight of cameras in order to be able to take photographs in his travels.
Barnack was the head of the development department at Leitz in Wetzlar. As early as 1905 Barnack had thought about the possibility of making small negatives that could be enlarged, as to ease photographers’ lugging of large view cameras and equipment. However, it was not until about 1913 that the idea came to life. Barnack turned a small instrument used for taking exposure samples for cinema film into the world’s first 35mm camera – it was called the Ur-Leica.
The “Ur-Leica”
Cross-section of the “Ur-Leica”
Very little is known about the personal life of Oskar Barnack. Most of the information about his life revolves around his creation. He is credited with the making of the very first 35mm camera that used short lengths of the 35mm movie film.
Originally it was considered a “miniature” camera, and with its high standards and breakthrough technology, it was the “quintessential miniature camera”, according to historian Robert Hirsch.
He wrote, “it was not only smaller and lighter than other hand-held cameras, but it utilized inexpensive standard movie stock, letting a photographer rapidly and unobtrusively make 36 exposures without reloading. Faster, high-definition, interchangeable lenses and a built-in coupled rangefinder followed.”
The Leica camera hit the German market and the 35mm format became the standard for still photography. The demand for quality film emulsions drove manufacturers in the US, Japan and Germany to satisfy it.
Oskar Barnack sitting at his desk in his office in the Leitz factory.
The E. Leitz factory in approx. 1929.
As film emulsions improved, so did image resolution and color reproduction. Many professional photographers were adopting 35mm camera equipment because of their superb lenses and the image quality delivered by modern films.
Dennis Gabor (5 June 1900 – 9 February 1979) was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and physicist, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics. He obtained British citizenship in 1934, and spent most of his life in England.
Gabor was born as Günszberg Dénes, into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. In 1918, his family converted to Lutheranism.
Dennis was the first-born son of Günszberg Bernát and Jakobovits Adél. Despite having a religious background, religion played a minor role in his later life and he considered himself agnostic.
In 1902, the family received permission to change their surname from Günszberg to Gábor. He served with the Hungarian artillery in northern Italy during World War I. He began his studies in engineering at the Technical University of Budapest in 1918, later in Germany, at the Charlottenburg Technical University in Berlin, now known as the Technical University of Berlin.
Studying the fundamental processes of the oscillograph, Gabor was led to other electron-beam devices such as electron microscopes and TV tubes. He eventually wrote his PhD thesis on Recording of Transients in Electric Circuits with the Cathode Ray Oscillograph in 1927, and worked on plasma lamps.
In 1933 Gabor fled from Nazi Germany, and was invited to Britain to work at the British Thomson-Houston company in Rugby, Warwickshire. There he met Marjorie Louise Butler, and they married in 1936. He became a British citizen in 1946, and it was while working at British Thomson-Houston that he invented holography, in 1947. He experimented with a heavily filtered mercury arc light source. However, the earliest hologram was only realised in 1964 following the 1960 invention of the laser, the first coherent light source. After this, holography became commercially available.
Gabor’s research focused on electron inputs and outputs, which led him to the invention of re-holography. The basic idea was that for perfect optical imaging, the total of all the information has to be used; not only the amplitude, as in usual optical imaging, but also the phase. In this manner a complete holo-spatial picture can be obtained.
While spending much of his retirement in Italy at Lavinio Rome, he remained connected with Imperial College as a senior research fellow and also became staff scientist of CBS Laboratories, in Stamford, Connecticut.
Gabor died in a nursing home in South Kensington, London, on 9 February 1979. In 2006 a blue plaque was put up on No. 79 Queen’s Gate in Kensington, where he lived from 1949 until the early 1960s.
The setup in the laboratory for making a hologram; a camera is not involved.
Schematic representation of how a hologram is created.
In 1971 he was the single recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics with the motivation “for his invention and development of the holographic method” and presented the history of the development of holography from 1948 in his Nobel lecture.
Self-Portrait-Harold-Edgerton; : The man who froze time!
Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990), also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device. He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography, and his equipment was used by Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness Monster.
Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska, on April 6, 1903, the son of Mary Nettie Coe and Frank Eugene Edgerton, a descendant of Samuel Edgerton, the son of Richard Edgerton, one of the founders of Norwich, Connecticut and Alice Ripley, a great-granddaughter of Governor William Bradford (1590–1657) of the Plymouth Colony and a passenger on the Mayflower. His father was a lawyer, journalist, author and orator and served as the assistant attorney general of Nebraska from 1911 to 1915. Edgerton grew up in Aurora, Nebraska. He also spent some of his childhood years in Washington, D.C., and Lincoln, Nebraska.
Every time you use the flash on your smartphone or camera, you should give silent praise to Harold Eugene Edgerton. In the era of vacuum tubes and radios the size of tables, Edgerton created a way to stop the world; a bullet passing through an apple; a footballer’s boot connecting with a ball; the crown-like splash created from a single drop of milk. He was the first man to harness electricity to freeze time to an instant.
Edgerton’s iconic images would be difficult enough to create today, even with computers on hand to open and close the shutter and fire the flash. But Edgerton took his pictures in the days of analogue, recording them on a motion picture camera converted to shoot at previously impossible speeds, and lighting them with an electric flash he invented himself. Intricate geometries happening so fast the human eye is incapable of comprehending them were suddenly captured for all to marvel at.
“He captured wonderful, captivating images that transcend the boundaries between science, art and entertainment,” says Colin Harding, a curator at the UK’s National Media Museum in Bradford.
To decades of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) he was known as ‘Doc’. To the pioneering underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, who collaborated with him, ‘Papa Flash’.
Glass shattered by a bullet. “The experience of seeing the unseen has provided me with insights and questions my entire life,” Edgerton once said. (Harold Edgerton Archive, MIT
Edgerton was born in 1903 in Nebraska, and became passionate about two things – photography and electricity. He was taught how to use a camera by his uncle, and worked for a local power company before being accepted as a student at MIT.
During an experiment using a rudimentary computer, Edgerton found the overheating warning lights (blinking at 60 times a second) seemed to freeze the moving parts of its motor as if they were standing still. It gave Edgerton the idea that bright, split-second bursts of light could illuminate this high-speed world.
In those days, there were no high-speed films allowing you to shoot with ambient light unless you used a shutter speed lasting many seconds – pretty useless unless your subject was stock still. Flash was vital in giving enough light for these ‘slow’ films to capture moving objects.
Up until then, flash in photography largely meant flash powder – a mixture of magnesium and potassium chlorate – which created an incandescent controlled explosion.
Edgerton created a stroboscopic light that contained a bulb full of an inert gas, initially mercury. The bulb was connected to a battery – the volt of current would cause the gas molecules to excite, causing an instant of bright light. The duration of the flash was much easier to adjust, making it more flexible, and thanks to the battery, the flash could recharge and be shot again and again (compare that to the magnesium-filled flashbulbs, which could only be used once and had to be thrown away). Edgerton called it the stroboscope.
Edgerton’s flash could fire a burst of light that lasted only 10 microseconds – 1/100,000th of a second – and replaced the mercury gas with xenon, which allowed the flash tubes to be smaller. It meant Edgerton had a device that could freeze the fastest bullet or rapidly beating hummingbird wing. The basic design still lives on in the electronic flashes we use today.
But more than this, says Dr Michael Pritchard, head of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), Edgerton was using high-speed photography as a diagnostic tool. ”Perhaps his greatest legacy (aside from his images) is his use of, and development, of a photographic technique as a tool for engineers to solve problems and to examine how machines operated.”
The Edgerton family in 1927; Harold is 10 years old.
Back row: Harold, Wally, Hazel, Rollo, Orrel, Sam, Kenneth
Front row: Gail, Marie, Doris, Leo
Photographic giant Kodak was initially sniffy, and thought Edgerton’s device would struggle to sell 50 examples. The professor later took a night-time photo of a boxing match, perfectly capturing the two fighters, and wired the photo to the nation’s newspapers to prove his point. The age of the electronic flash was born and many, many millions have been made since.
Edgerton’s pioneering work wasn’t confined to the studio. During World War II he developed a giant version of the electronic flash – that could be carried in the bomb bay of a modified bomber; he proved its worth to sceptical intelligence chiefs by illuminating the ancient site of Stonehenge on a moonless light. The flash system was later used to take photos of the drop zones in Normandy ahead of Allied paratroop landings, showing areas devoid of German troops that could be used as landing zones.
After World War II, Edgerton created his most technically impressive photographs – ones which captured the very first stages of an atomic explosion. No camera then devised could open and close its shutter quickly enough, so Edgerton built his own (called the Rapatronic). The light from the explosion activated a photo-electric cell on the front of the camera, which opened and closed the camera. By 1950, Edgerton’s technical team had managed to cut the shutter’s opening time to as little as 1/4,000,000th of a second; the atomic explosions he captured at Eniwetok Atoll in 1952 (from several miles away) are surreal orbs, looking like huge balls of melting wax.
Edgerton, who was still working when he died in 1990 at the age of 86, continued his photographic experiments throughout his academic and inventing career. His images became lauded not just as feats of technical prowess but as pieces of modern art. “A great populariser, Edgerton’s photographs with their unusual subject matter, sharp detail, strong use of colour and formal composition appeal to a very broad audience,” says Harding. “They confirm the extraordinary power of photography and create a sense of wonder from ordinary, everyday events such as a falling drop of milk.”
The coat of arms of the De Wouters d’Oplinter family.
Jean Guy Marie Josef Chevalier de Wouters d’Oplinter (1905 – 1973) was a Belgian inventor and aeronautical engineer. He was born in Brussels.
De Wouters apparently worked in aviation earlier in life, possibly during World War II, since he holds several patents for airplane improvements dating to that time period. He died in Rome in 1973.
Unfortunately I have not been able to obtain a suitable photo of Jean Guy Marie Josef Chevalier de Wouters d’Oplinter. Thus, at the right-hand side is a portrait of the famous French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
The Spiro Etanche or Phot 112 may have been the prototype or first version of the camera that Jean de Wouters designed for the French company La Spirotechnique. These cameras were manufactured by ATOMS (Association de Techniciens en Optique et Mecanique Scientifique) a Nice based company founded in 1945.
In 1957, Wouters d’Oplinter developed the first model, which was called the Spiro. He refined the Spiro and in 1958 it was introduced as the Calypso, named in honour of the marine research ship Calypso on which he had discussed the idea with Cousteau when both men were aboard the vessel on its first cruise. Jacques-Yves Cousteau, ex-captain of French Navy who is the inventor of aqua lungs and famous for his science film “Le Monde du Silence”
The Calypso-Phot was the first waterproof 35mm range finder camera that could be used either above or under water. It was distributed by La Spirotechnique in Paris from 1960. The camera is rated to operate down to 60 m (200 ft) below sea level. The Calypso was sometimes advertised as the “CALYPSO-PHOT”. Nikon took over production and sold it from 1963 as the Nikonos, which subsequently became a well-known series of underwater cameras, culminating with the introduction of the short-lived 35mm SLR Nikonos RS in 1992.
In fact, this offer of technology transfer and the right of world-wide (except EEC countries at that time) distribution was brought to Nippon Kogaku by La Spirotechnique.
Nippon Kogaku had once sold a housing for underwater photography which houses a range-finder type Nikon (Nikon S2, SP, S3 etc.) under the product name of “Nikon Marine.” It was supposed to be the reason for La Spirotechnique to choose Nippon Kogaku among many optical instrument manufacturers because that kind of experience was appreciated.
Then, what was the reason why Nippon Kogaku accepted the offer of La Spirotechnique? The “Calypso” was quite different from an ordinary camera, and its market was unknown, so it must have been quite risky for Nippon Kogaku.
To tell about the camera business of Nippon Kogaku, it was trying to expand the market of 35mm (135) SLR, acquired by Nikon F. As a part of the business expansion, it may have been attractive to go into the field of underwater photography. Moreover, I think, that the unique mechanism of this camera ‘Calypso’ has captivated the mind of technical staff of Nippon Kogaku.
When these unique mechanisms of ‘Calypso’ are described, a man who always makes an appearance is a Monsieur Jean de Wouters.
He was the man who designed the Calypso, and originated a number of unique mechanisms. He was involved in the production from the beginning when Nippon Kogaku manufactured Nikkonos, and was stationed in Japan from March 1964, that was the next year of the release of Nikkonos (I), to May 1965 and was engaged in the development of the next model of Nikkonos in collaboration with the design staff of Nippon Kogaku.
The main work of Monsieur Wouters during his one-year-and-three-months stay in Japan was the TTL metering mechanism of Nikkonos. It was to measure the intensity of light passing through the taking lens with the light sensors arranged in the periphery of the picture frame (aperture), but it was difficult to attain with the technology at that time when the TTL metering of the SLR was still at dawn. That dream of Monsieur Wouters had to wait until the release of Nikkonos IV-A in 1980.
Edwin Herbert Land, American physicist and inventor, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Edwin Land remembered after his father chastised him as young boy for dismantling a phonograph, from then on “nothing or nobody could stop me from carrying through the execution of an experiment.”
As a child, he was drawn to the beauty and utility of chemistry and optics. Kaleidoscopes and stereoscopes, optical wonders of the 19th century, held a particular fascination for Land.
While a freshman at Harvard University in 1926, he became interested in polarized light (light oriented in a plane with respect to the source). Taking a leave of absence, he developed a new kind of polarizer, which he called Polaroid, by aligning and embedding crystals in a plastic sheet. Land returned to Harvard at the age of 19 but left again in his senior year to found a laboratory nearby. Joined by other young scientists, he applied the polarizing principle to light filters, optical devices, and motion picture processes.
In 1937 the group became the Polaroid Corporation with Land as president and head of research. During World War II the corporation turned to military tasks, inventing infrared filters, dark-developing goggles, target finders, and the Vectrograph. The Vectrograph used a stereoscopic viewing system to view the camouflaged positions of enemy combatants.
Land’s most popular use for polarizing filters was found in instant cameras and film. His Polaroid Land camera, sold between 1948 and 1953 was the first commercially successful self-developing camera.
Polaroid Filters
Land continued his breakthroughs in the 1970s with the development of instant color photography which resulted in the SX-70 film and camera.
Land’s polarizing filters also found use outside of cameras. They are used in 3D glasses and to control brightness through a window which is a necessary component of LCD lighting.
In the late 1940s it introduced the first model of its most successful product, the self-developing Polaroid Land camera and associated film. The company also put out a microscope for viewing living cells in natural colour. For his contributions to the fields of polarized light, photography, and colour perception, Land received numerous awards and honorary degrees.
Even before the end of the war, however, Land was working on a research project that was to transform his already successful business. His source of inspiration was his three-year-old daughter, Jennifer: in 1944, whilst on a family holiday in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she asked him why she couldn’t see a photograph of her which he had just taken.
Land stated later: ‘As I walked around the charming town I undertook the task of solving the puzzle she had set me. Within an hour, the camera, the film and the physical chemistry became so clear to me.’
However, it was to take nearly three years of intensive research before Land was able to demonstrate his one-step system of photography at a meeting of the Optical Society of America in February 1947. Called the Land Camera, it was in commercial sale less than two years later.
Polaroid originally manufactured sixty units of this first camera. It was a large, heavy (it weighs about 4lb/18kg) camera of conventional folding design, fitted with an f/11, 135mm lens and a shutter giving speeds from 1/8 to 1/60sec. Fifty-seven were put up for sale at Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store before the 1948 Christmas holiday.
Polaroid marketers incorrectly guessed that the camera and film would remain in stock long enough to manufacture a second run based on customer demand. All fifty-seven cameras and all of the film were sold on the first day of demonstrations. By the time this first Model 95 was discontinued in 1953, it is estimated that around 900,000 had been sold.
Over the next few years, new models of Polaroid cameras appeared at regular intervals and within ten years the one-millionth Polaroid Land camera had been sold. Reflecting Edwin Land’s ever-fertile mind, Polaroid cameras were notable for their innovative use of new technology.
Introduced in 1963, the Automatic 100 embodied two important innovations. It was the first camera to have a fully automatic (hence the name) electronic shutter, and it was also the first camera to take Polaroid film packs (for eight exposures) rather than roll film which greatly simplified loading. Unlike earlier models, development took place outside the camera before the negative and positive sheets were peeled apart.
On November 17, 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Sasson the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. This is the highest honor awarded by the US government to scientists, engineers, and inventors.
Steven J. Sasson (born July 4, 1950) is an American electrical engineer and the inventor of the self-contained (portable) digital camera. Sasson is a 1972 (BS) and 1973 (MS) graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in electrical engineering. He attended and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. He has worked for Kodak since shortly after his graduation from engineering school.
Sasson was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Ragnhild Tomine (Endresen) and John Vincent Sasson. His mother was Norwegian. His invention began in 1975 with a broad assignment from his supervisor at Eastman Kodak Company, Gareth A. Lloyd: to attempt to build an electronic camera using a charge coupled device (CCD). The resulting camera invention was awarded the U.S. patent number 4,131,919.
So who invented the digital camera? A Kodak company engineer called Steve Sasson did, who put together a toaster-sized contraption that could save images using electronic circuits.
The crude looking blue and metal device weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg) and had only 100 × 100 resolution (0.01 megapixels). The images were transferred onto a tape cassette and were viewable by attaching the camera to a TV screen, a process that took 23 seconds.
His camera took images in black-and-white. But… the camera worked, and set the world on a path that leads us to modern smartphones today.
Today, the first digital camera Sasson made in 1975 is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. President Obama awarded Sasson the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a 2009 White House ceremony.
It was an astonishing achievement. And it happened in 1975, long before the digital age. Steve Sasson and his colleagues were met with blank faces when they unveiled their device to Kodak’s bosses. Even he didn’t full see its potential.
“It is funny now to look back on this project and realise that we were not really thinking of this as the world’s first digital camera,” Sasson was later to write on a company blog.
“We were looking at it as a distant possibility. Maybe a line from the technical report written at the time sums it up best: ‘The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.’ But in reality, we had no idea.”
For Kodak’s leaders, going digital meant killing film, smashing the company’s golden egg to make way for the new, so the product was dropped for fear it would threaten Kodak’s photographic film business.
Sasson continues to work for the Eastman Kodak Company, now working in an intellectual property protection role. Sasson joined the University of South Florida Institute for Advanced Discovery & Innovation in 2018, where he is a member and courtesy professor.
On September 6, 2012 The Royal Photographic Society awarded Sasson its Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship “in recognition of any invention, research, publication or other contribution that has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense.”
October 2009: The University of Rochester has conferred an honorary doctorate on Steven Sasson, who invented the first digital camera while working for Eastman Kodak Company. Sasson developed the prototype in Rochester in 1975, as a 25-year-old engineer fresh out of college, and received a patent for it in 1978, along with his then-supervisor Gareth Lloyd. Sasson went on to spend 35 years working for Kodak before retiring in February.
Prototype of the Digital Camera Playback system as Sasson used.
Leica Camera AG honored Sasson by presenting to him a limited edition 18-megapixel Leica M9 Titanium camera at the Photokina 2010 trade show event.
Sasson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011 , and later elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2018.