Cameras

It is believed that the camera was invented during the early 1500’s. This first unsophisticated camera was called the camera obscura, which meant dark chamber. Artists were the only people who used the camera as a tool to help them sketch scenery. They would trace the shapes and lines, and then color the picture.

The camera worked by light entering a tiny hole on one side of the dark box that was big enough to fit a grown human being. The light formed an image on the opposite wall. The picture was an upside-down image of the scenery outside the box.

     

During the 1660’s the length of the camera was reduced to around two feet. A lens placed over the holes made the image larger and sharper. A mirror inside the camera reflected the image onto a piece of ground glass at the top of the camera. The camera obscura provided a way to project an image on a wall or a screen, but this procedure wasn’t permanent. Artists still had to trace the image to preserve it.

In 1727, a German physicist named Johann H. Schulze proved that light darkens silver salts, because he discovered that silver salts are sensitive to light. Even though he used sunlight to make images on silver salts, he didn’t try to make the images permanent.

In 1900, George R. Lawrence built this mammoth 900 lb. camera, then the world’s largest, for $5,000 (enough to purchase a large house at that time!) It took 15 men to move and operate the gigantic camera. The photographer was commissioned by the Chicago & Alton Railway to make the largest photograph (the plate was 8 x 4.5 ft in size!) of its train for the company’s pamphlet "The Largest Photograph in the World of the Handsomest Train in the World."

The first camera that could actually produce a picture is credited to have been built by Charles and Vincent Chevalier, while the first photograph developed using this camera was by Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826. He exposed a light-sensitive metal plate in the camera and then used an engraving process to make the image permanent. The prototype of the modern camera was invented by George Eastman (1884) when he built a model using paper based photographic film and named his invention as Kodak. Before this, Photography involved complicated chemical processes involving glass plates and the development procedure was quite tedious.