History of Photography

History of Photography:

ka: kiloannum, thousand years before present (1950s due to nuclear contamination)

BCE: Before Common Era, years preceding 1 on the Gregorian Calendar 

CE: Common Era, years following 1 on the Gregorian Calendar

43,900 ka: Pig hunting in Indonesia, "the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world"

500 BCE: Chinese describe a camera obscura and the optical properties of light passing through a pinhole

1021 CE: First treatise on optics is written by Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham, detailing the first accurate description of vision 

1267 CE: Friar Roger Bacon brings al-Haytham's work to the west and makes the first description of a magnifying class by a westerner

1286 CE: Eyeglasses are invented in Italy on the back of Bacons translations of al-Haytham

1490 CE: Da Vinci produces a detailed drawing and description of a camera obscura

1604 CE: German astronomer first coins the term "camera obscura" by combining the Latin words for a vaulted chamber, "camera," and a term meaning dark or shadowy, "obscura." Today we have shortened this name to simply "camera", but they remain chambers of darkness

1608 CE: Hans Lippershey, a Dutch eyeglass maker, by chance invented the telescope. He called it "looker"

1610 CE: Galileo improves the magnifying power of telescope technology by up to 30X

1614 CE: Angelo Sala wrote his findings that "when you expose powdered silver nitrate to sunlight, it turns black as ink." A key step in the development of black and white photography

1620 CE: German astronomer Johannes Kepler designs and builds the first portable camera obscura

1660 CE: Francesco Maria Grimaldi first records the observation of diffraction, and provides us its modern name

1660s CE: Isaac Newton splits a beam of light, discovering that white light is composed of the entire spectrum

1704 CE: Isaac Newton first describes light as behaving like particles generally do, in his book "Opticks"

1717 CE: Johann Heinrich Schulze conducts experiments with silver salts and makes the same observation Angelo Sala did a century earlier

1827 CE: Nicéphore Niépce used light sensitive bitumen of Judea and a many hour exposure to create the first permanent image captured in history

1835 CE: Englishman Henry Fox Talbot successfully records a photograph on paper using salts of silver

1839 CE: Louis Daguerre, working on the shoulders of what he accomplished together with Nicéphore Niépce before his passing, Invented the first practically viable process of capturing an image and fixing it in a permanent state; By accident as the best inventions are often made

1841 CE: Hasselblad founded as a trading company in Gothenburg, Sweden, under the name F. W. Hasselblad and Co.

1846 CE: Three chemists independently discover that cellulose nitrate is soluble in ether, and can be combined with ethanol to produce a gelatinous liquid called Collodion

1846 CE: Carl Zeiss AG is founded by German optician Carl Zeiss in Jena

1850 CE: American Levi Hill was the first to develop a partial color photograph allegedly by the use of layered chemicals of varying wavelengths sensitivity. Known as Hillotypes

1853 CE: The Journal of the Photographic Society, now known as the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain to reflect the royal patronage of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, is first published making it the oldest photographic periodical in the world

1853-1856 CE: The first war to be documented photographically, The Crimean War, between the Ottomans, the French and the British Empire against the Russian Empire

1861 CE: The single lens reflex (SLR) camera was invented by British camera inventor Thomas Sutton on the Ilse of Jersey

1869 CE: Leica founded by Ernst Leitz Wetzlar as the Ernst Leitz Werke

1879 CE: Ilford Photographic is founded under the name Britannia Works Company in the basement of Alfred Hugh Harman, he manufactured gelatin photographic plates

1884 CE: First marketed SLR glass plate camera patented in the USA by Calvin Rae Smith, called the Monocular Duplex

1887 CE: The Rev. Hannibal Goodwin files a patent for a method of producing celluloid-film, this patent was delayed by more than a decade. This patent was later sold to Ansco

1887 CE: Folmer and Schwing Manufacturing Company founded in NYC by William F. Folmer. Originally producing gas lighting fixtures, this company is the predecessor to the famed Graflex camera company

1888 CE: George Eastman, founder of Kodak, invented mass produced paper roll film. Revolutionizing photography, which previously relied on delicate glass or silver plates 

1889 CE: Kodak introduces a patent for celluloid based roll film, utilizing camphor to plasticize the cellulose nitrate

1889 CE: William Friese-Greene files the first patent for a Kinescope, capable of taking 10 photographs a second, making him the inventor of Kinematography. Known today as cinematography, from the ancient Greek words roughly meaning a moving image

1890 CE: Ilford publishes its first Manual of Photography

1891 CE: Rodinal patented

1893 CE: Thomas Edison completes the Black Maria, in West Orange NJ, making it the first film production studio in the world

1898 CE: Graflex introduces the Graflex Reflex, also known as the Graflex Camera

1903 CE: Autochrome Lumièr, the first process developed for achieving color photographs in camera, is patented by the Lumièr Brothers of France

1908 CE:  Franco-Luxembourgish physicist Gabriel Lippmann is awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his advancements in the realm of color photography using solely black and white chemistry, known as the Lippmann Process

1912 CE: First Speed Graphic cameras produced by Graflex

1914 CE: Ansco successfully sues Kodak for $5,000,000 for patent infringement, 148,000,000 in 2022 dollars

1916 CE: Process 1, two strip Technicolor process implemented

1917 CE: Three Japanese optics manufacturers merged to form Nippon Kōgaku Tōkyō K.K., or Japan Optical Industries Corporation

1920 CE: Fairchild Aerial Camera Corperation founded

1922 CE: Process 2, two color subtractive Technicolor process implemented

1925 CE: Process of film sensitization discovered, increasing the sensitivity and speed of films available to consumers and improving the overall quality of movies

1927 CE: Fairchild Aviation Corporation is incorporated from a number of Fairchild business outgrowths of the Fairchild Areal Camera Corporation

1928 CE: Process 3, 3 strip Technicolor imbibition process allowed for the full color spectrum to be displayed and gave us vivid early American cinema like The Wizard of Oz

1932 CE: Nikon introduces the Nikkor brand as a westernization of Nikkō an abbreviation of their original name, Nippon Kōgaku (Japan Optics)

1933 CE: 4 Japanese men join together to found Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory, the predecessor to Canon

1934 CE: Precision Optical Instruments produces the Kwanon, one of Japans first focal plane shutter 35mm cameras. This name comes from the Buddhist bodhisattva Kannon, the "Goddess of Mercy," she is often referred to as the "most widely beloved Buddhist Divinity." Her full name translates to "[The One Who] Perceives the Sounds of the World"

1935 CE: Kodachrome released as the first commercially available color 35mm film

1936 CE: Ihagee Kamerawerk of Germany produces the first regular productions 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) camera, the Exakta

1936 CE: Zeiss begins development of a 35mm SLR camera using an eye level pentaprism viewfinder

1937 CE: Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory becomes Precision Optical Instruments, Co., Ltd.

1938 CE: first accurate description of the physics of photo development published in a scientific journal by R. W. Gurney and N. F. Mott

1938 CE: Vivitar was founded in Santa Monica, California, under the name Ponder and Best, named for its founders Max Ponder and John Best

1939 CE: Calumet Manufacturing Company founded, a Chicago based photographic good manufacturer and later distributor, before their bankruptcy in 2014

1939 CE: Patents filed for optical glass with as much as 30% by weight Thorium Oxide, giving a higher refractive index, and requiring less glass and curvature. Some lenses produced with this glass have upwards of 60X background radiation, and were produced into the 70's

1946 CE: The first photographs taken from space are made by a motion picture camera mounted to in the nose of a Nazi V-2 rocket, taken to the United States as war spoils and launched by American scientists from White Sands Missile Base in New Mexico. In 1950 National Geographic describes some of these images as “how our Earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a space ship”

1947 CE: Precision Optical Instruments, Co., Ltd. changes its name to the recognizable Canon Camera Co., Inc.

1947 CE: First eye level viewfinder 35mm SLR camera utilizing a pentaprism is produced by Italian camera manufacturer Rectaflex

1948 CE: Edwin Land unveiled the first commercial instant photography camera, the Model 95 Land Camera

1948 CE: Nikon produces the Nikon I, the first production camera to be branded a Nikon

1949 CE: Kodak patents a formula for Thorium glass 

1950 CE: Eastmancolor is introduced as the first economical single strip color film for use in motion pictures, production of which was previously barred by the "Monopack Agreement" between Technicolor and Kodak

1958 CE: Graflex releases the Super Speed Graphic

1960 CE: Leica patents one of the worlds first autofocus systems for use in cameras

1962 CE: John Glenn becomes the first person to ever take a hand-help photograph photograph in space, using a jerry-rigged Minolta Ansco Autoset 35mm bought from a local drugstore. Also onboard Friendship VII was a German built Leica 1g (1957) outfitted to photograph the ultraviolet spectra of stars, a wavelength largely filtered out by Earth's atmosphere. This becomes the first astronomical experiment conducted by an Astronaut while in space

1962 CE: NASA begins using Hasselblad cameras on its space flight missions during the Mercury Program

1969 CE: Canon Camera Co., Inc. changes its name to Canon Inc.

1971 CE: Canon introduces the Canon F-1

1975 CE: Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak, invents the worlds first digital camera. With a resolution of 0.01 megapixels

1976 CE: Canon introduces the first commercial camera with a micro processor