History Of Camera Development

Cameras have come a long way, from the first crude cameras that projected images onto walls to the day-long exposure times of the 1820s to the 60-second Polaroids of the 1950s and '60s to digital cameras today. The history of camera development includes innovation in jumps and starts, as people slowly created more efficient and accurate methods to capture our most precious moments.

Earliest Cameras

The earliest known camera, called the camera obscura, was used in ancient times to project images before photographic printing processes were invented. Leonardo Da Vinci wrote the first detailed description of the camera obscura in the 15th century, describing it as a box with a pinhole on one side and a glass screen on the other. A lens later replaced the pinhole, resulting in sharper images.

First Photo

In 1826, Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first photograph with a camera obscura, titled "View from the Window at Le Gras." Niépce created the image with pewter plates treated with a photosensitive chemical called bitumen. The exposure took eight hours, and the image is still visible today.

19th Century Developments 
Camera obscuras continued to be used, with a variety of printing treatments, until the first folding camera was created by Charles Chevalier in 1840. Folding cameras were more portable, and they created images on silver-plated copper sheets, called daguerreotypes. In the mid 1850s bellows cameras were introduced. These allowed for greater focal length and the ability to take close-ups. The wet collodion film process also gained popularity in the early 1850s, and led to the addition of draining channels on cameras to keep film wet.

University of London photography lecturer Thomas Sutton created the first single lens reflex (SLR) camera in 1860. Sutton's SLR camera incorporated internal mirrors. Twin lens reflex cameras were introduced in 1881, and featured SLR-style mirrors with two lenses.

Kodak and Leica 
In 1888, the George Eastman Company introduced the first Kodak camera, the lightest and simplest camera to date. It sold for $25, with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest." zin 1900, the popular Kodak Brownie camera debuted with a retail price of $1.

The UR-Leica was invented by Oskar Barnack in 1913, and was one of the earliest cameras to use 35 mm film. The Leica A was developed in 1925, and quickly gained popularity thanks to its portability and lens quality.

Quick and Easy Cameras 
The first Polaroid camera, which produced an image in just 60 seconds, was created in 1947 by Edwin Land. Polaroid cameras enjoyed quick success thanks to the popularity of their instant images. This breakthrough was followed by the 1953 release of the Kodak Instamatic, the first fully automatic mass-produced camera. The first disposable camera, called the Quicksnap, was created by Fuji in 1986.

Modern Photography
The development of professional and autofocus 35mm SLRs, as well as simple point-and-shoot cameras, took off in the 1980s.

In 1981, Sony's Mavica became the first electronic camera to be commercially available. Instead of film, the Mavica recorded images onto a minidisk.

The first truly digital camera was introduced by Kodak in 1991, and was marketed to professional photojournalists. A few years later, in 1994, the first mass-market digital camera, the Apple Quick Take 100, was introduced.