Early Advances

The roots of photography can be traced back to the fourth and fifth centuries BC, when the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the mathematician Euclid described a pinhole camera, and the sixth century AD, when Anthemius of Tralles used a camera obscura in his experiments. Even though these early forerunners of today’s cameras were only capable of projecting an image, they were more than mathematical and scientific curiosities. The 18th century painter Canaletto was known to have used a camera obscura, and it is widely thought that Vermeer, the 17th century Dutch master, used one as well.

It wasn’t until a means of fixing the image was developed, to make it portable and permanent, that photography really took off. This was the real beginning of photography as an artistic and social medium. In 1826, the French inventor, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, produced the first permanent photograph on polished pewter. This means that photography, as we know it, has been in existence for a little less than two centuries.

Niépce died in 1833 and left his notes to Louis Daguerre. In 1839 Daguerre announced a process that used silver on a copper plate, and the daguerreotype was born. During the Industrial Revolution, the daguerreotype satisfied a demand for portraits from the new middle class. This ready market helped to drive the technological development of photography.

Sometime prior to 1839, William Henry Fox Talbot discovered a different method using silver iodide to fix an image, but he didn’t refine it to make the images readily available until after Daguerre announced his process. Around this time Talbot created the calotype process, the first method that involved a negative. This was significant because it was the first time that one exposure could produce any number of prints. The word calotype comes from the Greek for beautiful impression.

The terms negative and positive were coined by the mathematician, astronomer, and experimental photographer John Herschel. He also came up with the word photography, without realizing it had already been used by Hercules Florence five years before, in 1834. Herschel was also responsible for the cyanotype process, which made blueprints possible, and he was the first to use a glass negative.

Glass plate and printing technology was refined throughout the 19th century until 1884 when George Eastman developed the first roll-film technology. This led directly to the film technology still used by photographers today.