Who Started Photography?

When you're looking through your pictures of a recent trip or last night when you went out with the girls, do you ever wonder who created the invention that helps you capture all the important moments in your life? I'd never given it much thought before now, I was just thankful I had my camera around.

Here's how photography started and the people who made is possible.

Joseph Niepce is credited with producing the first successful photograph in June/July 1827. He started his research in 1814 and eventually succeeded, calling his invention the Heliographs. He teamed up with Louis Daguerre in 1829, and the two worked together until 1833 when he passed away.

Joseph Niepce

Joseph Niepce's First Photograph

Daguerre continued to experiment and in 1835 made an important discovery by accident. He discovered that a latent image could be developed due to mercury vapour. It took him two years to figure out a way to fix the image, which he called a Daguerreotype. His discovery was made public in January of 1939, but details weren’t given until August. There were several drawbacks on the first daguerreotypes. Not only was it very fragile but, portraitures were the only images possible due to the length of exposure and images were laterally reversed.

Louis Daguerre

William Henry Fox Talbot created the Calotype process, which was considered competition to the Daguerreotype. The Calotype worked by exposing silver iodide to light. When exposed to light, the silver iodide decomposes to silver leaving iodine. Excess silver iodide is washed away with a solution of silver nitrate, acetic and Gallic acids. Because silver oxide is black, a image is visible. This is the negative image which positive images can be printed onto silver chloride paper. This made Calotype superior to the Daguerreotype in the aspect that Daguerreotypes could only produce one image whereas the Calotype could create multiple copies.

William Henry Fox Talbot

Scott Archer changed photography with the development of the wet collodion in 1851, which allowed the making of finely detailed negatives. He mixed collodion with potassium iodide that was then immersed in a solution of silver nitrate. The exposure and development had to take place in the camera while the plate was still wet. The new process reduced exposure times to a matter of seconds. The downside was that the collodion dried fast, and the need for pre-prepared plates became evident.

Scott Archer

Dr. Richard Maddox loved photography, but found the collodion process was negatively affecting his health. In 1871 he suggested that the sensitizing chemicals should be coated on a glass plate in a gelatin mixture instead of wet collodion. Years later, Charles Bennett, made the first dry plates for sale and by the end of the decade the dry plate process surpassed the wet plate process. 

Dr. Richard Maddox 

Where did I find all this information and pictures? :

"Frederick Scott Archer." index. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2011. <http://www.samackenna.co.uk/fsa/FSArcher.html>.

"Joseph Niecpe First Picture.jpg." Wikimedia Commons . N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2011. <commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Niepce_First_Picture.jpg>.

"Joseph-Nicephore Niepce." The Robinson Library. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2011. <http://www.robinsonlibrary.com/technology/photography/biography/niepce.htm>.

Leggat , Robert. "A History of Photography." Some of the sites managed by Robert Leggat. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2011. <http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/>.

"Louis Daguerre." Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2011. <http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/154813>.

"William Henry Fox Talbot." NNDB: Tracking the entire world. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2011. <http://www.nndb.com/people/397/000098103/>.

case., prosecuting Claudet. But in the end Claudet won the. "VIPS in photography." Under Construction. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Jan. 2011. <http://webh01.ua.ac.be/elmc/website_FL/VIPs_eng.htm>.