Freeing Light And Time: The History Of Photography

The history of photography owes a great debt to bored, bull-headed Europeans who wouldn't take "it can't be done" for an answer. The name "photography" was first used in 1839 by Sir John F.W. Hershel, who coined the term from "photos", meaning "light" and "graphien" meaning "to draw" in Greek. In the 1800's anything Classical, whether Greek, Roman or Egyptian was considered the height of excellence, hence naming a brand new art form with Greek words.

Who's To Blame?

In the history of photography, the man who finally got images to fix to film was a Frenchman (wait for it)

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre.

In 1829, he managed to take the first photograph. As there were no Photomats at the time, he had to develop it himself. It took nearly eight hours to develop one photograph. In ten years, he'd cut that developing time to about a half hour. He humbly named this procedure Daguerreotype, one of the names sometimes still used for photography.

Daguerre used to work in theater painting backdrops. He noticed light could make images on his still wet paint. This was a pivotal moment in the history of photography when someone realized that light could be frozen onto paper. Only Daguerre used sheets of metal to capture the images on.

Photography caught on in a flash. You needn't wait weeks or months for a formally painted portrait - you could now get one in two weeks or less. The history of photography goes from one sensation to another, making each new twist even more popular than the one before it.

Other Milestones

The metal photographic plates were heavy and costly. Thin sheets of tin were cheaper and worked just as effectively. They were called tintypes and came out in 1856 by Hamilton Smith.

George Eastman discovered that a kind of film used to capture images and sent off to a professional developer could bring photography to the masses. The first film camera came out in 1888. He made a fortune and is still known in the history of photography because of the Eastman Kodak company.

All images were in black and white or sepia and white at this time. Some negatives were hand painted in order to give a color image. All of that changed in the late 1930's, when a color film was introduced, Kodachrome. And that, as they say, was the history of photography.