History

of
Photography

By- Ashish Verma

• Some historians argue that hominids used camera obscuras to project images to trace with stone
tools. In the fourth century BCE, Han Chinese philosopher Mozi wrote about the camera obscura.
• Greek philosopher Aristotle expanded on Mozi’s ideas in his Corpus Aristotelicum Problems –
Book XV, saying “Why is it that an eclipse of the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through
leaves, such as a plane-tree or other broadleaved tree, or if one joins the fingers of one hand over the
fingers of the other, the rays are crescent-shaped where they reach the earth? Is it for the same reason as
that when light shines through a rectangular peep-hole, it appears circular in the form of a cone?”
• Nearly 2000 years after Aristotle’s Problems, Renaissance inventor Leonardo Da Vinci formally
outlined the camera obscura in his 1502 Codex Atlanticus. He said, “If the facade of a building, or a
place, or a landscape is illuminated by the sun and a small hole is drilled in the wall of a room in a
building facing this, which is not directly lighted by the sun, then all objects illuminated by the sun will
send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole.”
• But although Mozi, Aristotle, Da Vinci, and others understood how camera obscuras worked, they didn’t
know how to capture permanent images. That’s where Nicéphore Niépce comes into the equation.
• Heinrich Schulze (1725)
discovered sensitivity of Silver
Nitrate to light rather than
heat.
 Thomas Wedgwood (1802)

• Used Silver Nitrate on

paper/leather. He found that Silver
Solution with Sodium Chloride
creates Silver Chloride (Whitish
Paste).
• But process is too slow and
impractical to use in camera.
 Joseph Nicephore Niépce

• Around 1816, created negative images on paper

(Silver Chloride) by partially fixing them using
Nitric Acid.

• Not satisfied and moved to Asphaltum/Bitumen.

• Used Pewter plates (Tin+Lead) and called them

Heliographs (Sun Drawings) (min exposure ~8hr).

• His only surviving 1826 Heliograph known as

View from the Window at "Le Gras" took 2 days of
exposure.
 • The term Photography
first used by:-

Antoine Hercules Romuald Florence

in 1833 (Brazil)
• Sir John Herschel, in Britain, also
used the terms
photography and photograph in
1839 and was credited for it.
• Also, discovered Sodium
thiosulfate/Hypo in 1819.
Louis Jacques Mandé
Daguerre

• The invention of the daguerreotype was

revealed in an announcement published
in January, 1839, in the official bulletin of
the French Academy of Sciences, after
Daguerre had succeeded in interesting
several scientist-politicians in the new
process of making pictures.
• Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and
Niepce.
• Then Daguerre discovered Silver Iodide
requires less exposure time.
• Picture- Boulevard du Temple,
Paris, c. 1838.
 William Henry Fox Talbot

• In 1841, Talbot changed his formula to use silver

iodide, which was more sensitive than silver
chloride. It was the very same silver halide as used
by Daguerre, though applied to paper.
• The latent image was developed to its final form in
a solution of gallic acid (trihydroxybenzoic acid)
and then stabilized in potassium bromide (KBr) or
permanently fixed in sodium thiosulfate (Na₂S₂O₃).
• The new process was called the "Calotype", from
the Greek kalos, meaning “beautiful”.
Eadweard Muybridge (1878)
• Kodak Brownie Camera (1900)