Technology

In this day and age we take for granted the use of technology and all of the things that we use that pertain to this. One of the most popular devices that we use is the camera. But what most people don’t know is that the camera has acctually been around for quite some time. Yet, before they were invented painters were the only people who were able to preserve family photos or be able to capture the beautiful scenery.

The very first permanent photograph was made between 1826 and 1827 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera that was invented by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris. Niépce built upon a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz, a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light.

While this was the birth of photography, the camera can acctually be traced back much further. Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura, a device that dates back to the 11th century which uses a pinhole or lens to project an image of the scene outside onto a viewing surface. Before the invention of photographic processes, there was no way to preserve the images produced by these cameras apart from manually tracing them.

The earliest cameras were practically the size of a room, with space for one or more people inside. Eventually they evolved into more and more compact models such that by Niépce’s time portable handheld cameras suitable for photography were readily available. In fact, the first camera obscura that was compact enough to be practical for photography was built by Johann Zahn in 1685, almost 150 years before photographic technology caught up to the point where such an application was possible.