| From Earliest Times | | It may seem strange but cameras existed long before photography. It had been observed as far back as the fifth century BC that an image of the outside scene was formed by sunlight shining through a small hole into a darkened room. The phrase Camera Obscura means "Darkened Room". |
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| From 16th Century | | Camera Obscura was improved by utilising a simple lens. |
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| 1666 | Isaac Newton | Demonstrated that light is the source of colour. He used a prism to split sunlight into its constituent colours and another to recombine them to make white light. |
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| 1725 | Johann Schulze | Discovered the darkening of silver salts by the action of light. |
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| 1758 | Dolland | Developed the Achromatic telescope lens, this improved the camera obscura image. |
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| 1801 | Thomas Young | Suggested that the retina at the back of the eye contains three types of colour sensitive receptor, one sensitive to blue light, one to green and one to red. The brain interprets various combinations of these colours to form any other colour in the visible spectrum. |
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| 1802 | Wedgwood | Produced silhouettes of opaque objects by contact printing them on silver nitrate coated paper however the images were unfixed and faded in daylight. |
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| 1826 | J. Nicephore
Niepce | Produced the first permanent image (Heliograph) using a camera obscura and white bitumen it required 8 hours to expose. |
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| 1829 | Daguerre | Started partnership with Niepce. |
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| 1834 | Fox Talbot | Experiments using Silver chloride coated paper to yield "negatives" of silhouettes. |
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| 1835 | Fox Talbot | Using his small "mousetrap" cameras he photographs the inside of his library window at Lacock Abbey, creating the first negative. |
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| 1837 | Daguerre | Following experiments on his own he evolved a workable process (Daguerreotype). Silver iodide coated copper plate was exposed and developed by mercury to give a single direct positive. He removed the remaining silver iodide with a warm solution of cooking salt, they took 30 minutes to develop. |
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| 1839 | Daguerre | Daguerreotype process released for general use in return for state pensions given to Daguerre and Isidore Niepce. Patented in England. On August 19th 1839 Argo announced details. |
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| 1839 | Fox Talbot | Hurriedly prepared and presented papers at the Royal Institution and the Royal Society. Unlike the Daguerre process the image is recorded as a "negative" and had to be printed via a similar process to produce the final "positive". Many positive prints can be made from a single negative. |
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| 1839 | Sir John Herschel | Suggests fixing Talbot's images in sodium thiosulphate and coined the terms "photography", "negative" and "positive". |
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| 1840 | Fox Talbot | Following suggestions he improved his process, using silver iodide and developing in gallic acid. The use of paper negatives meant that the images were not as detailed as Dagurreotypes. |
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| 1841 | Fox Talbot | Patented "calotype" (later "Talbotype") a negative / positive process with 5 minutes exposure time. |
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| 1841 | Petzval | Mathematically calculated compound lens of f/3.6 effectively reduces Daguerreotype exposure to 1 minute. |
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| 1844 | Fox Talbot | Publishes "Pencil of Nature" the first book with photographic illustrations, glued in calotypes . |
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| 1847 | Niepce De St.
Victor | Discovers the use of albumen to bind silver salts on glass base. Albumen process requires 10 minutes exposure. Talbot patents process in England. |
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| 1850 | Blanquart-Evrard | Proposes use of Albumen for printing paper. Albumen paper was never patented and was popularly used for 40 years. |
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| 1851 | Scott Archer | Proposes "Collodion" process. Collodion (a solution of nitrocellulose in a mixture of ethyl alcohol and ethyl ether) forms a binder for silver iodide on glass. Exposure and processing is performed immediately after coating plate. Scott Archer did not patent the process and died in poverty. Two versions of this process were "Ambrotype" and "Tintype" . Exposure was about 10 seconds . The Collodion process greatly expanded photography and brought everyone into contact with its results. |
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| 1861 | James Clerk
Maxwell | Demonstrated the formation of colours by combining three light sources of red, green and blue. All other colours, including white, are a mixture of these primary colours. The colours combine by an additive process. |
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| 1868 | Louis Ducos du
Hauron | Published a book suggesting how a range of colour photographic methods might work, but they could not yet be put into practice. |
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| 1871 | Dr. Richard Leach Maddox | Writing in the ‘British Journal Of Photography’ he suggested gelatin, derived from a protein found in animal bones, as a collodion substitute. Gelatin "Emulsions" and "Dry Plates" were marketed by various manufacturing companies from 1878, and gelatin is still used today. Exposure times of 1/25th second could be achieved. |
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| 1887 | Hannibal Goodwin | New York clergyman filled patent for roll film with a flexible plastic base |
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| 1888 | George Eastman | Produced the first simplified camera system for the general public, The Kodak Number 1, and the first mass Developing and Processing service. |
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| 1889 | George Eastman | Produced the first transparent roll film (nitrocellulose) |
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| 1889 | Thomas Edition | Slit the 2 3/4 inch Kodak roll film down the middle making it 1 3/8 inch (35mm) and put transport perforations down each side - to become the international standard for motion picture film. |
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| 1890 | Hurter & Driffield | Devised the first independent system to give emulsions speed numbers, this essentially led to the current ISO numbers on film boxes today. |
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| 1890's | | The first halftone photographic reproductions appeared in daily papers, although it took another ten years before the process was fully adopted. Halftones were created by using a camera containing a ruled glass screen with a grid pattern to break up the image into tiny dots of different sizes. |
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| 1904 | Dr. H. Vogel | Research lead to panchromatic film using sensitising dyes. This type of film is sensitive to all visible colours. |
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| 1904 | Augusta and
Louis Lumiere | Patented "Autochrome" the first additive colour screen film material. |
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| 1912 | Siegrist and
Fischer | The two German chemists invented the action of colour coupling , so dyes required for colour film processing could be created by combining appropriate developer oxidation products with colour former chemicals. However the process was not reliable enough to start film production. |
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| 1924 | Oscar Barnack | An employer of E. Leitz designed a camera for use with a microscope using motion picture film, this became the first precision 35mm camera. It was called the Leica derived from Leitz camera. The capabilities of the Leica made a new form of photojournalism possible, as typified by the Magnum photographic agency. |
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| 1935 | Kodak | Mannes and Godowsky helped develop Kodachrome for home movies, the following year it was introduced in 35mm format. |
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| 1936 | Agfa | This German company was the first to sell a film, Agfacolor, with the colour formers in the film. Towards the end of the second World War their closely guarded secrets were "liberated". |
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| 1940s | | Large factory size laboratories took over film processing from individual chemists. However chemists still continued to sell films. |
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| 1947 | Magnum | Magnum, arguably the most famous photographic agency in the world, was founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and Robert Capa. The agency developed a style of photojournalism that was largely based upon the capability of the Leica 35 mm camera. Magnum is still an exclusive club of illustrious photographers with membership limited to thirty six. |
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| 1947 | Dr. Edwin Land | Invented an "instant" picture process, first called Polaroid Land. The special camera sandwiched the exposed negative with a receiving positive paper and spread the processing chemicals between the two, after processing these were peeled apart. |
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| 1963 | Dr. Edwin Land | His Polaroid Corporation's research team invented the first instant colour picture material. |
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| 1976 | Canon | AE-1 the first 35mm camera with built in microprocessor is introduced |
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| 1980s | | A system called DX coding was introduced for 35mm films. The cassettes have an auto-sensing code printed on them which enable certain cameras to automatically set the film speed, this information can also be used by processing laboratories. |
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| 1984 | Canon | Demonstrated the first digital still camera. |
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| 1985 | Minolta | The Minolta 7000 auto-focus 35mm SLR camera was introduced |
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| 1990 | Microsoft | Windows 3.1 is released |
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| 1990 | Adobe | Adobe Photoshop 1.0 image manipulation program is introduced for Apple Macintosh computers |
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| 1992 | Tim Berners-Lee | Develops the software and protocol for the World Wide Web (WWW) |
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| 1993 | Adobe | Adobe Photoshop is made available for MS-Windows computers. |
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| 1993 | NCSA | Release the first World Wide Web browser. |
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| 1994 | Netscape | Launch their WWW browser called Navigator. |
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| 1996 | APS | Advanced Photo System (APS) is introduced. APS uses a cassette which holds 24 mm wide film on a base which has a magnetic data strip as well as fine grained emulsion. When the film is being developed automatic handling mechanisms locate the correct frames and determines the required print format from the data strip. After processing the film is rewound into the cassette and a digitally mastered index print of all the frames is created as a reference for reordering. |
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| 1996 | Microsoft | Release their WWW browser called Internet Explorer. |
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| 1998 | | The first consumer megapixel cameras were introduced. |
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| 2000 | Canon | Canon introduced the EOS D30, the first digital SLR for the consumer market with aCMOS sensor |
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| 2000 | Sharp and J-Phone | In November 2000 Sharp and J-Phone introduced the first camera-phone in Japan. The J-SH04 is a mobile phone with a built in camera, it uses a 110,000-pixel CMOS image sensor and began the trend for camera-phones. These cameras play an increasingly significant role in photography, for example the main news pictures covering the 7 July 2005 London bombings were taken by the general public on camera-phones and not by professional news crews. However the use of camera-phones can also be abused leading to invasions of privacy and other forms of socially unacceptable behaviour.
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