A Brief History of photography

View from the Window at Le Gras 1826 or 1827, believed to be the earliest surviving camera
photograph.[1] Original (left) & colorized reoriented enhancement (right).
The history of photography began in remote antiquity with the discovery of two critical
principles: camera obscura image projection and the observation that some substances are visibly
altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to
capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.
Around 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze captured cut-out letters on a bottle of a light-sensitive
slurry, but he apparently never thought of making the results durable. Around 1800, Thomas
Wedgwood made the first reliably documented, although unsuccessful attempt at capturing
camera images in permanent form. His experiments did produce detailed photograms, but
Wedgwood and his associate Humphry Davy found no way to fix these images.
In the mid-1820s, Nicéphore Niépce first managed to fix an image that was captured with a
camera, but at least eight hours or even several days of exposure in the camera were required and
the earliest results were very crude. Niépce's associate Louis Daguerre went on to develop
the daguerreotype process, the first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic
process. The daguerreotype required only minutes of exposure in the camera, and produced clear,
finely detailed results. The details were introduced to the world in 1839, a date generally
accepted as the birth year of practical photography.[2][3] The metal-based daguerreotype process
soon had some competition from the paper-based calotype negative and salt print processes
invented by William Henry Fox Talbot and demonstrated in 1839 soon after news about the
daguerreotype reached Talbot. Subsequent innovations made photography easier and more
versatile. New materials reduced the required camera exposure time from minutes to seconds,
and eventually to a small fraction of a second; new photographic media were more economical,
sensitive or convenient. Since the 1850s, the collodion process with its glass-based photographic
plates combined the high quality known from the Daguerreotype with the multiple print options
known from the calotype and was commonly used for decades. Roll films popularized casual use
by amateurs. In the mid-20th century, developments made it possible for amateurs to take
pictures in natural color as well as in black-and-white.
The commercial introduction of computer-based electronic digital cameras in the 1990s soon
revolutionized photography. During the first decade of the 21st century, traditional film-based
photochemical methods were increasingly marginalized as the practical advantages of the new
technology became widely appreciated and the image quality of moderately priced digital
cameras was continually improved. Especially since cameras became a standard feature on
smartphones, taking pictures (and instantly publishing them online) has become a ubiquitous
everyday practice around the world.

Etymology
The coining of the word "photography" is usually attributed to Sir John Herschel in 1839.
It is based on the Greek φῶς (phōs), (genitive: phōtós) meaning "light", and γραφή
(graphê), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light". [4]

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Early history of the camera-Camera obscura

Principle of a box camera obscura with mirror

A natural phenomenon, known as camera obscura or pinhole image, can project a

(reversed) image through a small opening onto an opposite surface. This principle may
have been known and used in prehistoric times. The earliest known written record of the
camera obscura is to be found in Chinese writings by Mozi, dated to the 4th century
BCE.[5] Until the 16th century the camera obscura was mainly used to study optics and
astronomy, especially to safely watch solar eclipses without damaging the eyes. In the
later half of the 16th century some technical improvements were developed:
a biconvex lens in the opening (first described by Gerolamo Cardano in 1550) and
a diaphragm restricting the aperture (Daniel Barbaro in 1568) gave a brighter and
sharper image. In 1558 Giambattista della Porta advised using the camera obscura as a
drawing aid in his popular and influential books. Della Porta's advice was widely
adopted by artists and since the 17th century portable versions of the camera obscura
were commonly used — first as a tent, later as boxes. The box type camera obscura
was the basis for the earliest photographic cameras when photography was developed
in the early 19th century.

Before 1700: Light sensitive materials

The notion that light can affect various substances — for instance, the suntanning of
skin or fading of textile — must have been around since very early times. Ideas of fixing
the images seen in mirrors or other ways of creating images automatically may also
have been in people's minds long before anything like photography was developed.
[7]
 However, there seem to be no historical records of any ideas even remotely
resembling photography before 1700, despite early knowledge of light-sensitive
materials and the camera obscura.[8]
In 1614 Angelo Sala noted that[9] sunlight will turn powdered silver nitrate black, and that
paper wrapped around silver nitrate for a year will turn black. [10]
Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals in 1694. [11]

1700 to 1802: earliest concepts and fleeting photogram results

Schulze's Scotophorus: earliest fleeting letter photograms (circa 1717)
Around 1717,[12] German polymath Johann Heinrich Schulze accidentally discovered that
a slurry of chalk and nitric acid into which some silver particles had been dissolved was
darkened by sunlight. After experiments with threads that had created lines on the
bottled substance after he placed it in direct sunlight for a while, he applied stencils of
words to the bottle. The stencils produced copies of the text in dark red, almost violet
characters on the surface of the otherwise whitish contents. The impressions persisted
until they were erased by shaking the bottle or until overall exposure to light obliterated
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them. Schulze named the substance "Scotophorus" when he published his findings in
1719. He thought the discovery could be applied to detect whether metals or minerals
contained any silver and hoped that further experimentation by others would lead to
some other useful results.[13][14] Schulze's process resembled later photogram techniques
and is sometimes regarded as the very first form of photography. [15]
De la Roche's fictional image capturing process (1760)
The early science fiction novel Giphantie[16] (1760) by the Frenchman Tiphaigne de la
Roche described something quite similar to (color) photography, a process that fixes
fleeting images formed by rays of light: "They coat a piece of canvas with this material,
and place it in front of the object to capture. The first effect of this cloth is similar to that
of a mirror, but by means of its viscous nature the prepared canvas, as is not the case
with the mirror, retains a facsimile of the image. The mirror represents images faithfully,
but retains none; our canvas reflects them no less faithfully, but retains them all. This
impression of the image is instantaneous. The canvas is then removed and deposited in
a dark place. An hour later the impression is dry, and you have a picture the more
precious in that no art can imitate its truthfulness." [17] De la Roche thus imagined a
process that made use of a special substance in combination with the qualities of a
mirror, rather than the camera obscura. The hour of drying in a dark place suggests that
he possibly thought about the light sensitivity of the material, but he attributed the effect
to its viscous nature.
Scheele's forgotten chemical fixer (1777)
In 1777, the chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was studying the more intrinsically light-
sensitive silver chloride and determined that light darkened it by disintegrating it into
microscopic dark particles of metallic silver. Of greater potential usefulness, Scheele
found that ammonia dissolved the silver chloride, but not the dark particles. This
discovery could have been used to stabilize or "fix" a camera image captured with silver
chloride, but was not picked up by the earliest photography experimenters. [18]
Scheele also noted that red light did not have much effect on silver chloride, a
phenomenon that would later be applied in photographic darkrooms as a method of
seeing black-and-white prints without harming their development. [19]
Although Thomas Wedgwood felt inspired by Scheele's writings in general, he must
have missed or forgotten these experiments; he found no method to fix the photogram
and shadow images he managed to capture around 1800 (see below). [19]
Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy: Fleeting detailed photograms (1790?–1802)
English photographer and inventor Thomas Wedgwood is believed to have been the
first person to have thought of creating permanent pictures by capturing camera images
on material coated with a light-sensitive chemical. He originally wanted to capture the
images of a camera obscura, but found they were too faint to have an effect upon
the silver nitrate solution that was recommended to him as a light-sensitive substance.
Wedgwood did manage to copy painted glass plates and captured shadows on white
leather, as well as on paper moistened with a silver nitrate solution. Attempts to
preserve the results with their "distinct tints of brown or black, sensibly differing in
intensity" failed. It is unclear when Wedgwood's experiments took place. He may have

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started before 1790; James Watt wrote a letter to Thomas Wedgwood's father Josiah
Wedgwood to thank him "for your instructions as to the Silver Pictures, about which,
when at home, I will make some experiments". This letter (now lost) is believed to have
been written in 1790, 1791 or 1799. In 1802, an account by Humphry Davy detailing
Wedgwood's experiments was published in an early journal of the Royal Institution with
the title An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making
Profiles, by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver. Davy added that the method
could be used for objects that are partly opaque and partly transparent to create
accurate representations of, for instance, "the woody fibres of leaves and the wings of
insects". He also found that solar microscope images of small objects were easily
captured on prepared paper. Davy, apparently unaware or forgetful of Scheele's
discovery, concluded that substances should be found to eliminate (or deactivate) the
unexposed particles in silver nitrate or silver chloride "to render the process as useful as
it is elegant".[19] Wedgwood may have prematurely abandoned his experiments because
of his frail and failing health. He died at age 34 in 1805.
Davy seems not to have continued the experiments. Although the journal of the nascent
Royal Institution probably reached its very small group of members, the article must
have been read eventually by many more people. It was reviewed by David Brewster in
the Edinburgh Magazine in December 1802, appeared in chemistry textbooks as early
as 1803, was translated into French and was published in German in 1811. Readers of
the article may have been discouraged to find a fixer, because the highly acclaimed
scientist Davy had already tried and failed. Apparently the article was not noted by
Niépce or Daguerre, and by Talbot only after he had developed his own processes. [19][20]
Jacques Charles: Fleeting silhouette photograms (circa 1801?)
French balloonist, professor and inventor Jacques Charles is believed to have captured fleeting
negative photograms of silhouettes on light-sensitive paper at the start of the 19th century, prior
to Wedgwood. Charles died in 1823 without having documented the process, but purportedly
demonstrated it in his lectures at the Louvre. It was not publicized until François
Arago mentioned it at his introduction of the details of the daguerreotype to the world in 1839.
He later wrote that the first idea of fixing the images of the camera obscura or the solar
microscope with chemical substances belonged to Charles. Later historians probably only built
on Arago's information, and, much later, the unsupported year 1780 was attached to it. [21] As
Arago indicated the first years of the 19th century and a date prior to the 1802 publication of
Wedgwood's process, this would mean that Charles' demonstrations took place in 1800 or 1801,
assuming that Arago was this accurate almost 40 years later.

1816 to 1833: Niépce's earliest fixed images

The earliest known surviving heliographic engraving, made in 1825. It was printed from a metal
plate made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce with his "heliographic process".[22] The plate was
exposed under an ordinary engraving and copied it by photographic means. This was a step

4
towards the first permanent photograph from nature taken with a camera obscura. View of the
Boulevard du Temple, a daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, is generally accepted as
the earliest photograph to include people. It is a view of a busy street, but because the exposure
lasted for several minutes the moving traffic left no trace. Only the two men near the bottom left
corner, one of them apparently having his boots polished by the other, remained in one place
long enough to be visible.
In 1816, Nicéphore Niépce, using paper coated with silver chloride, succeeded in photographing
the images formed in a small camera, but the photographs were negatives, darkest where the
camera image was lightest and vice versa, and they were not permanent in the sense of being
reasonably light-fast; like earlier experimenters, Niépce could find no way to prevent the coating
from darkening all over when it was exposed to light for viewing. Disenchanted with silver salts,
he turned his attention to light-sensitive organic substances.[23]

Robert Cornelius, self-portrait, October or November 1839, an approximately quarter plate size
daguerreotype. On the back is written, "The first light picture ever taken". One of the oldest
photographic portraits known, 1839 or 1840,[24] made by John William Draper of his sister,
Dorothy Catherine Draper A photograph captured by Mary Dillwyn in Wales in 1853.
A calotype showing the American photographer Frederick Langenheim, circa 1849. The caption
on the photo calls the process "Talbotype"
The oldest surviving photograph of the image formed in a camera was created by Niépce in 1826
or 1827.[2] It was made on a polished sheet of pewter and the light-sensitive substance was a thin
coating of bitumen, a naturally occurring petroleum tar, which was dissolved in lavender oil,
applied to the surface of the pewter and allowed to dry before use.[25] After a very long exposure
in the camera (traditionally said to be eight hours, but now believed to be several days), [26] the
bitumen was sufficiently hardened in proportion to its exposure to light that the unhardened part
could be removed with a solvent, leaving a positive image with the light areas represented by
hardened bitumen and the dark areas by bare pewter. [25] To see the image plainly, the plate had to
be lit and viewed in such a way that the bare metal appeared dark and the bitumen relatively
light.[23]
In partnership, Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône and Louis Daguerre in Paris refined the bitumen
process,[27] substituting a more sensitive resin and a very different post-exposure treatment that
yielded higher-quality and more easily viewed images. Exposure times in the camera, although
substantially reduced, were still measured in hours.[23]

1832 to 1840: early monochrome processes[edit]

Niépce died suddenly in 1833, leaving his notes to Daguerre. More interested in silver-based
processes than Niépce had been, Daguerre experimented with photographing camera images
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directly onto a mirror-like silver-surfaced plate that had been fumed with iodine vapor, which
reacted with the silver to form a coating of silver iodide. As with the bitumen process, the result
appeared as a positive when it was suitably lit and viewed. Exposure times were still
impractically long until Daguerre made the pivotal discovery that an invisibly slight or "latent"
image produced on such a plate by a much shorter exposure could be "developed" to full
visibility by mercury fumes. This brought the required exposure time down to a few minutes
under optimum conditions. A strong hot solution of common salt served to stabilize or fix the
image by removing the remaining silver iodide. On 7 January 1839, this first complete practical
photographic process was announced at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences,[28] and the
news quickly spread.[29] At first, all details of the process were withheld and specimens were
shown only at Daguerre's studio, under his close supervision, to Academy members and other
distinguished guests.[30] Arrangements were made for the French government to buy the rights in
exchange for pensions for Niépce's son and Daguerre and present the invention to the world
(with the exception of Great Britain, where an agent for Daguerre patented it) as a free gift.
[31]
 Complete instructions were made public on 19 August 1839.[32] Known as
the daguerreotype process, it was the most common commercial process until the late 1850s
when it was superseded by the collodion process.
French-born Hércules Florence developed his own photographic technique in Brazil in 1832 or
1833 with some help of pharmacist Joaquim Corrêa de Mello (1816–1877). Looking for another
method to copy graphic designs he captured their images on paper treated with silver nitrate as
contact prints or in a camera obscura device. He did not manage to properly fix his images and
abandoned the project after hearing of the Daguerreotype process in 1839 [33] and didn't properly
publish any of his findings. He reportedly referred to the technique as "photographie" (in French)
as early as 1833, also helped by a suggestion of De Mello. [34] Some extant photographic contact
prints are believed to have been made in circa 1833 and kept in the collection of IMS.
Henry Fox Talbot had already succeeded in creating stabilized photographic negatives on paper
in 1835, but worked on perfecting his own process after reading early reports of Daguerre's
invention. In early 1839, he acquired a key improvement, an effective fixer, from his friend John
Herschel, a polymath scientist who had previously shown that hyposulfite of soda (commonly
called "hypo" and now known formally as sodium thiosulfate) would dissolve silver salts.
[35]
 News of this solvent also benefited Daguerre, who soon adopted it as a more efficient
alternative to his original hot salt water method.[36]
Talbot's early silver chloride "sensitive paper" experiments required camera exposures of an hour
or more. In 1841, Talbot invented the calotype process, which, like Daguerre's process, used
the principle of chemical development of a faint or invisible "latent" image to reduce the
exposure time to a few minutes. Paper with a coating of silver iodide was exposed in the camera
and developed into a translucent negative image. Unlike a daguerreotype, which could only be
copied by rephotographing it with a camera, a calotype negative could be used to make a large
number of positive prints by simple contact printing. The calotype had yet another distinction
compared to other early photographic processes, in that the finished product lacked fine clarity
due to its translucent paper negative. This was seen as a positive attribute for portraits because it
softened the appearance of the human face[citation needed]. Talbot patented this process,[37] which
greatly limited its adoption, and spent many years pressing lawsuits against alleged infringers.
He attempted to enforce a very broad interpretation of his patent, earning himself the ill will of
photographers who were using the related glass-based processes later introduced by other

6
inventors, but he was eventually defeated. Nonetheless, Talbot's developed-out silver halide
negative process is the basic technology used by chemical film cameras today. Hippolyte
Bayard had also developed a method of photography but delayed announcing it, and so was not
recognized as its inventor.
In 1839, John Herschel made the first glass negative, but his process was difficult to reproduce.
Slovene Janez Puhar invented a process for making photographs on glass in 1841; it was
recognized on June 17, 1852 in Paris by the Académie Nationale Agricole, Manufacturière et
Commerciale.[38] In 1847, Nicephore Niépce's cousin, the chemist Niépce St. Victor, published
his invention of a process for making glass plates with an albumen emulsion; the Langenheim
brothers of Philadelphia and John Whipple and William Breed Jones of Boston also invented
workable negative-on-glass processes in the mid-1840s.[39]

1850 to 1900
In 1851, English sculptor Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion process.[40] Photographer
and children's author Lewis Carroll used this process. (Carroll refers to the process as
"Tablotype" in the story "A Photographer's Day Out".)[41]
Herbert Bowyer Berkeley experimented with his own version of collodion emulsions after
Samman introduced the idea of adding dithionite to the pyrogallol developer.[citation needed] Berkeley
discovered that with his own addition of sulfite, to absorb the sulfur dioxide given off by the
chemical dithionite in the developer, dithionite was not required in the developing process. In
1881, he published his discovery. Berkeley's formula contained pyrogallol, sulfite, and citric
acid. Ammonia was added just before use to make the formula alkaline. The new formula was
sold by the Platinotype Company in London as Sulpho-Pyrogallol Developer.[42]
Nineteenth-century experimentation with photographic processes frequently became proprietary.
The German-born, New Orleans photographer Theodore Lilienthal successfully sought legal
redress in an 1881 infringement case involving his "Lambert Process" in the Eastern District of
Louisiana.

Roger Fenton's assistant seated on Fenton's photographic van, Crimea, 1855 Boston, as the Eagle
and the Wild Goose See It, by J.W. Black, the first recorded aerial photograph, 1860The 1866
"Jumelle de Nicour", an early attempt at a small-format, portable camera

Popularization
The daguerreotype proved popular in response to the demand for portraiture that emerged from
the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution.[43][citation needed] This demand, which could not
be met in volume and in cost by oil painting, added to the push for the development of
photography.

7
Roger Fenton and Philip Henry Delamotte helped popularize the new way of recording events,
the first by his Crimean War pictures, the second by his record of the disassembly and
reconstruction of The Crystal Palace in London. Other mid-nineteenth-century photographers
established the medium as a more precise means than engraving or lithography of making a
record of landscapes and architecture: for example, Robert Macpherson's broad range of
photographs of Rome, the interior of the Vatican, and the surrounding countryside became a
sophisticated tourist's visual record of his own travels.
In 1839, François Arago reported the invention of photography to stunned listeners by displaying
the first photo taken in Egypt; that of Ras El Tin Palace.[44]
In America, by 1851 a broadsheet by daguerreotypist Augustus Washington was advertising
prices ranging from 50 cents to $10.[45] However, daguerreotypes were fragile and difficult to
copy. Photographers encouraged chemists to refine the process of making many copies cheaply,
which eventually led them back to Talbot's process.
Ultimately, the photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements
in the first 20 years. In 1884 George Eastman, of Rochester, New York, developed dry gel on
paper, or film, to replace the photographic plate so that a photographer no longer needed to carry
boxes of plates and toxic chemicals around. In July 1888 Eastman's Kodak camera went on the
market with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest".[citation needed] Now anyone could take
a photograph and leave the complex parts of the process to others, and photography became
available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of the Kodak Brownie.

General view of The Crystal Palace at Sydenham by Philip Henry Delamotte, 1854
 
 A mid-19th century "Brady stand" armrest table, used to help subjects keep still
during long exposures. It was named for famous US photographer Mathew Brady.
 

8
 An 1855 Punch cartoon satirized problems with posing for Daguerreotypes: slight
movement during exposure resulted in blurred features, red-blindness made rosy
complexions look dark.
 

In this 1893 multiple-exposure trick photo, the photographer appears to be

photographing himself. It satirizes studio equipment and procedures that were nearly
obsolete by then. Note the clamp to hold the sitter's head still.
 

A comparison of common print sizes used in photographic studios during the 19th century. Sizes
are in inches.

Stereoscopic photography

Charles Wheatstone developed his mirror stereoscope around 1832, but did not really publicize
his invention until June 1838. He recognized the possibility of a combination with photography

9
soon after Daguerre and Talbot announced their inventions and got Henry Fox Talbot to produce
some calotype pairs for the stereoscope. He received the first results in October 1840, but was
not fully satisfied as the angle between the shots was very big. Between 1841 and 1842 Henry
Collen made calotypes of statues, buildings and portraits, including a portrait of Charles
Babbage shot in August 1841. Wheatstone also obtained daguerreotype stereograms from Mr.
Beard in 1841 and from Hippolyte Fizeau and Antoine Claudet in 1842. None of these have yet
been located.
David Brewster developed a stereoscope with lenses and a binocular camera in 1844. He
presented two stereoscopic self portraits made by John Adamson in March 1849.[47] A
stereoscopic portrait of Adamson in the University of St Andrews Library Photographic Archive,
dated "circa 1845', may be one of these sets.[46] A stereoscopic daguerreotype portrait of Michael
Faraday in Kingston College's Wheatstone collection and on loan to Bradford National Media
Museum, dated "circa 1848", may be older.[48]

Colour process

The first durable color photograph, taken by Thomas Sutton in 1861

A practical means of color photography was sought from the very beginning. Results were
demonstrated by Edmond Becquerel as early as the year of 1848, but exposures lasting for hours
or days were required and the captured colors were so light-sensitive they would only bear very
brief inspection in dim light.
The first durable color photograph was a set of three black-and-white photographs taken
through red, green, and blue color filters and shown superimposed by using three projectors with
similar filters. It was taken by Thomas Sutton in 1861 for use in a lecture by
the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who had proposed the method in 1855.[49] The
photographic emulsions then in use were insensitive to most of the spectrum, so the result was
very imperfect and the demonstration was soon forgotten. Maxwell's method is now most widely
known through the early 20th century work of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. It was made practical
by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel's 1873 discovery of a way to make emulsions sensitive to the rest of
the spectrum, gradually introduced into commercial use beginning in the mid-1880s.

Alim Khan  by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky  Mark Twain by Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1908,

Two French inventors, Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros, working unknown to each
other during the 1860s, famously unveiled their nearly identical ideas on the same day in 1869.

10
Included were methods for viewing a set of three color-filtered black-and-white photographs in
color without having to project them, and for using them to make full-color prints on paper.[50]
The first widely used method of color photography was the Autochrome plate, a process
inventors and brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière began working on in the 1890s and
commercially introduced in 1907.[51] It was based on one of Louis Ducos du Hauron's ideas:
instead of taking three separate photographs through color filters, take one through a mosaic of
tiny color filters overlaid on the emulsion and view the results through an identical mosaic. If the
individual filter elements were small enough, the three primary colors of red, blue, and green
would blend together in the eye and produce the same additive color synthesis as the filtered
projection of three separate photographs.
Autochrome plates had an integral mosaic filter layer with roughly five million previously dyed
potato grains per square inch added to the surface. Then through the use of a rolling press, five
tons of pressure were used to flatten the grains, enabling every one of them to capture and absorb
color and their microscopic size allowing the illusion that the colors are merged. The final step
was adding a coat of the light-capturing substance silver bromide, after which a color image
could be imprinted and developed. In order to see it, reversal processing was used to develop
each plate into a transparent positive that could be viewed directly or projected with an ordinary
projector. One of the drawbacks of the technology was an exposure time of at least a second in
bright daylight, with the time required quickly increasing in poor light. An indoor portrait
required several minutes with the subject stationary. This was because the grains absorbed color
fairly slowly, and a filter of a yellowish-orange color was required to keep the photograph from
coming out excessively blue. Although necessary, the filter had the effect of reducing the amount
of light that was absorbed. Another drawback was that the image could only be enlarged so much
before the many dots that made up the image would become apparent.
Competing screen plate products soon appeared, and film-based versions were eventually made.
All were expensive, and until the 1930s none was "fast" enough for hand-held snapshot-taking,
so they mostly served a niche market of affluent advanced amateurs.
A new era in color photography began with the introduction of Kodachrome film, available for
16 mm home movies in 1935 and 35 mm slides in 1936. It captured the red, green, and blue color
components in three layers of emulsion. A complex processing operation
produced complementary cyan, magenta, and yellow dye images in those layers, resulting in
a subtractive color image. Maxwell's method of taking three separate filtered black-and-white
photographs continued to serve special purposes into the 1950s and beyond, and Polachrome, an
"instant" slide film that used the Autochrome's additive principle, was available until 2003, but
the few color print and slide films still being made in 2015 all use the multilayer emulsion
approach pioneered by Kodachrome.

Development of digital photography

Walden Kirsch as scanned into the SEAC computer in 1957

In 1957, a team led by Russell A. Kirsch at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology developed a binary digital version of an existing technology, the wirephoto drum
scanner, so that alphanumeric characters, diagrams, photographs and other graphics could be
11
transferred into digital computer memory. One of the first photographs scanned was a picture of
Kirsch's infant son Walden. The resolution was 176x176 pixels with only one bit per pixel, i.e.,
stark black and white with no intermediate gray tones, but by combining multiple scans of the
photograph done with different black-white threshold settings, grayscale information could also
be acquired.[53]
The charge-coupled device (CCD) is the image-capturing optoelectronic component in first-
generation digital cameras. It was invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at
AT&T Bell Labs as a memory device. The lab was working on the Picturephone and on the
development of semiconductor bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith
conceived of the design of what they termed "Charge 'Bubble' Devices". The essence of the
design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor. It was Dr. Michael
Tompsett from Bell Labs however, who discovered that the CCD could be used as an imaging
sensor. The CCD has increasingly been replaced by the active pixel sensor (APS), commonly
used in cell phone cameras. These mobile phone cameras are used by billions of people
worldwide, dramatically increasing photographic activity and material and also fueling citizen
journalism.

2.

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