The name Photography was penned by Sir John Herschel , who first used the term
in 1839 which is the year the photographic process became public. The word is
derived from the Greek words for light and writing.
The invention
The two processes that combine into photographic process had been known for
quite some time in 1839, but it was not until the two distinct scientific processes
had been put together that photography was invented.
The first of these processes is an optical process. The dark room, or camera
obscura, had been in existence for four hundred years alreay in 1839. There
is for example a drawing, dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci.
The second process was chemical. For hundreds of years before photography was
invented people knew that some colours fade in the sun, but they had made little
distinction between heat, air and light.
In the sixteen hundreds Robert Boyle, a founder of the Royal Society, had reported
that silver chloride turned dark under exposure, but he appeared to believe
that it was caused by exposure to the air, rather than to light. Also, Angelo
Sala, in the early seventeenth century, noticed that powdered nitrate of silver
is blackened by the sun. In 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that certain
liquids change colour when exposed to light.
The first successful picture was produced in June 1827 by Niépce, using
material that hardened on exposure to light. The picture required an exposure
of eight hours.
The photographic wet plates
On 4 January 1829 Niépce went into a partnership with Louis Daguerre
. Niépce died four years later, but Daguerre continued to experiment.
he shortly after that discovered a way of developing photographic plates, a
process which greatly reduced the exposure time from eight hours down to half
an hour. He also discovered that an image could be made permanent by immersing
it in a salt solution.
Following a report on this invention by Paul Delaroche , a leading scholar of
the day, the French government bought the rights to it in July 1839. Details
of the process were made public on 19 August 1839, and Daguerre named it the
Daguerreotype. The Daguerreotype process was expensive and little progress was
done after the initial findings.
In 1851 a new era in photography was introduced by Frederick Scott Archer ,
who introduced the Collodion process. This process was a lot faster than conventional
methods, and reduced exposure times to two or three seconds. This opened up
new horizons in photography.
Prices for daguerreotypes varied immensely, but in general would cost about
a guinea (about $2), which would be about a weekly wage for a worker. The collodion
process was much cheaper. Prints could be made for as little as one shilling
(10 cents).
The collodion process required that the coating, exposure and development of
the image need be done whilst the plate was still wet. Another process developed
by Archer was named the Ambrotype , which was a direct positive.
The wet collodion process required a considerable amount of equipment on location.
There were various attempts to preserve exposed plates in wet collodion but
the preservatives lessened the sensitivity of the material.
The dry plate process
The next big leap forward came in 1871, when Dr. Richard Maddox discovered a
way of using Gelatin instead of glass as a basis for the photographic plate.
This led to the development of the dry plate process. Dry plates could be developed
much more quickly than with any previous technique.
The introduction of the dry-plate process marked a turning point. No longer
did the photographer need the cumbersome wet-plates, and neither was the darkroom
needed. One was very near the day that pictures could be taken without the photographer
needing any specialised knowledge.
Celluloid had been invented in the early eighteen-sixties, and John Carbutt
persuaded a manufacturer to produce very thin celluloid as a backing for sensitive
material. George Eastman is particularly remembered for introducing flexible
film in 1884. Four years later Mr. Eastman introduced the box camera, and photography
could now reach a much greater number of people.
Other names of significance include Herman Vogel , who developed a means whereby
film could become sensitive to green light, and Eadweard Muybridge who paved
the way for motion picture photography.