Strobelit

When looking at today’s modern digital cameras, it can be hard to imagine that the roots of the practice go back more than 6000 years, to the 4^th and 5^th centuries BCE. That’s when the pinhole camera was first described, both by Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and by the Greek tag-team of Aristotle and Euclid. The first known camera obscura (a device that projects an image of its surroundings onto a screen) was first used by Anthemius of Tralles in the 6^th century CE. Ibn al-Haytham, an Arab scientist, did further research on the pinhole camera and camera obscura in the 9^th and 10^th centuries CE.Of course, a lot had to happen to bring these early examples of naturally harnessing the powers of light and projection to being able to store an image physically. The discoveries of silver nitrate by Albertus Magnus (12^th century CE) and silver chloride by Georges Fabricius (16^th century CE) helpedsilver nitrate is treated with halide salts to form silver halide in photographic gel, and silver chloride reacts with photons to form a latent image, which can then be developed to form a visible picture.In 1694, Wilhelm Homberg described the photochemical effect (the darkening of some chemicals by light). French philosopher Tiphaigne de la Roche put some of the pieces together to give an accurate description of early photography in his 1760 novel Gigantie, but it wasn’t until 1826 that the first photograph was produced by French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce. Niepce accidentally destroyed his first photograph, but continued his experiments and captured La cour du domaine du Gras (View from the Window at Le Gras) later in the year. The photo was made with a camera obscura focused on a sheet of bitumen. Interestingly, the 8-hour exposure time captured sunlight on both sides of the building. A plate of this legendary photograph can be seen at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.Niepce partnered with Louis Daguerre and made the process more accurate. The result was the daguerreotype, announced in 1839, which uses heated mercury vapor to develop the image on a copper plate coated with silver. Daguerre took the first photograph of a human in 1839 as wellthe man had stopped to get his shoes shined and thus was in place for the full exposure time. Also in 1839, William Fox Talbot demonstrated the calotype, another early photographic process. Thus, 1839 is considered the year that photography was born.James Clark Maxwell brought photography one step closer to its current state when he took the first color image in 1861. However, the first full-color plate was not made available until 1907. The Autochrome was invented by France’s Lumiere brothers and used an additive color process to create imagesred, green, or blue light was filtered through grains of potato starch onto a photographic emulsion, which was developed to a negative and then reverse-processed.The charge-coupled device, invented by Willard Boyle and George Smith in 1969, brought photography into the digital age which we all enjoy today. This device moves an electrical charge between regions, and when combined with an image sensor enabled digital imaging. Photography continues to race into the future even today, though, and while it’s tempting to say there’s not much further we can go, we really have no idea what the future will bring.