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CASSIW DANIEL F. AUG.

10, 2018

Photography (after the Greek photo – light and graph – draw, write) – light drawing or light writing was
not discovered at once or by a single person. This discovery had accumulated from the work of many
generations of scientists from different countries of the world.
People had always looked for a way to get pictures without the long and tedious work of an artist.
It was noticed ages ago that a sunbeam penetrating through a tiny hole into a dark room would leave a
light drawing of the outer world objects on a surface. The objects are depicted in exact ratio and colors
but their size is diminished in comparison to reality and they are seen upside down. This peculiarity of the
dark room (camera obscura) was already known to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who lived in IV
BC. The principle of the camera obscura operation was also described by Leonardo da Vinci.
It is known that glasses were invented as far as the 1300. The spectacle lens led to the Galileo Galilee
spyglass. The great Russian scientist Lomonosov started the development of fast lenses and other
optics.
Then came the time when advances led to a camera obscura that was a box with a biconvex lens in the
front side and semitransparent paper or opal glass in the back. This equipment was used for mechanical
drawing of real objects. The upside down image could be easily put upright with the help of a mirror and
outlined on a piece of paper with a pencil.
In the middle of the 18th century Russia a camera obscura became wide spread called "makhina dlya
snimania pershpektiv" (a machine for taking perspectives), made as a marching tent. It helped to depict
documental views of Petersburg, Petergoff, Kronstadt and other Russian cities. It was "photography
before photography". The work of an artist was simplified. But to make it mechanical was not enough.
People wanted to learn not only to focus a "light drawing" in the camera obscura but to fix it fast on a
surface by chemicals.
But while optics for the invention of photography were developed many centuries back, in it was not until
the 1700's that chemistry became well developed as a science.
One of the most important factors leading to the invention of a way to transform an optical pattern into a
chemical process in a light-sensitive layer was a discovery made by a young Russian amateur chemist
Bestuzhev-Rjumin (1693 - 1766), who would later become a prominent statesman and diplomat, and a
German anatomist and surgeon J.H. Schulze (1687-1744). Developing liquid treatments in 1725
Bestuzhev-Rjumin noticed that iron salt solutions change their color under sunlight. In two years Schulze
produced proof of bromine salt's photosensitivity.
But scientists and inventors from different countries began to purposefully work on chemical fixing of a
camera obscura light image only in the first third of the 19th century. Best results were achieved by
Frenchmen Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765 - 1833), Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1787 - 1851), and
an Englishman William Fox Talbot (1800 - 1877). These are the people who are known as inventors of
photography to the whole world now.
Although there were some attempts to obtain a photo image as far as 1700's, the year of photography
invention is considered to be 1839, when so called daguerrotypy appeared in Paris. Using the results
of his own investigations and the experiments of Nicéphore Niépce the French inventor Louis Daguerre
had a success with photographing a man and getting a stable photo image. The exposure time reduced in
comparison to earlier tests (less than 1 min) as well. In contrast to modern photography, which produces
a negative, daguerreotype produced a positive that made it impossible to have many copies.
The history of photography has roots in remote antiquity with the discovery of two critical principles, that
of the camera obscura image projection and the fact that some substances are visibly altered by
exposure to light, as discovered by observation. Apart from a very uncertain process used on the Turin
Shroud there are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate that anyone even imagined capturing images
with light sensitive materials before the 18th century.
Around 1717 Johann Heinrich Schulze captured cut-out letters on a bottle of a light-sensitive slurry, but
he apparently never thought of making the results durable. Around 1800 Thomas Wedgwood made the
first reliably documented, although unsuccessful attempt at capturing camera images in permanent form.
His experiments did produce detailed photograms, but Wedgwood and his associate Humphry Davy
found no way to fix these images.
In the mid-1820s, Nicéphore Niépce first managed to fix an image that was captured with a camera, but
at least eight hours or even several days of exposure in the camera were required and the earliest results
were very crude. Niépce's associate Louis Daguerre went on to develop the daguerreotype process, the
first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic process. The daguerreotype required only
minutes of exposure in the camera, and produced clear, finely detailed results. The details were
introduced as a gift to the world in 1839, a date generally accepted as the birth year of practical
photography.[1][2] The metal-based daguerreotype process soon had some competition from the paper-
based calotype negative and salt print processes invented by William Henry Fox Talbot. Subsequent
innovations made photography easier and more versatile. New materials reduced the required camera
exposure time from minutes to seconds, and eventually to a small fraction of a second; new photographic
media were more economical, sensitive or convenient, including roll films for casual use by amateurs. In
the mid-20th century, developments made it possible for amateurs to take pictures in natural color as well
as in black-and-white
The oldest surviving photograph of the image formed in a camera was created by Niépce in 1826
or 1827.[1] It was made on a polished sheet of pewter and the light-sensitive substance was a thin
coating of bitumen, a naturally occurring petroleum tar, which was dissolved in lavender oil,
applied to the surface of the pewter and allowed to dry before use.
Etymology. The word "photography" was created from the Greek roots φωτός (phōtos),
genitive of φῶς (phōs), "light" and γραφή (graphé) "representation by means of lines" or
"drawing", together meaning "drawing with light". Several people may have coined the same
new term from these roots independently
CASSIW DANIEL F. Aug. 10,2018

PERSONALITIES

Johann Heinrich Schulze accidentally discovered that a slurry of chalk and nitric acid into which some
silver particles had been dissolved was darkened by sunlight. After experiments with threads that had
created lines on the bottled substance after he placed it in direct sunlight for a while, he applied stencils of
words to the bottle.
Tiphaigne de la Roche described something quite similar to (colour) photography, a process that fixes
fleeting images formed by rays of light: "They coat a piece of canvas with this material, and place it in
front of the object to capture
Carl Wilhelm Scheele was studying the more intrinsically light-sensitive silver chloride and determined
that light darkened it by disintegrating it into microscopic dark particles of metallic silver. Of greater
potential usefulness, Scheele found that ammonia dissolved the silver chloride but not the dark particles
Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805) is believed to have been the first person to have thought of creating
permanent pictures by capturing camera images on material coated with a light-sensitive chemical. He
originally wanted to capture the images of a camera obscura, but found they were too faint to have an
effect upon the silver nitrate solution that was advised to him as a light-sensitive substance
Humphry Davy detailing Wedgwood's experiments was published in an early journal of the Royal
Institution with the title An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles,
by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver. Davy added that the method could be used for objects that
are partly opaque and partly transparent to create accurate representations of for instance "the woody
fibres of leaves and the wings of insects". He also found that solar microscope images of small objects
were easily captured on prepared paper.
Jacques Charles is believed to have captured fleeting negative photograms of silhouettes on light
sensitive paper at the start of the 19th century, prior to Wedgwood
François Arago mentioned it at his introduction of the details of the Daguerreotype to the world in 1839
In 1816 Nicéphore Niépce, using paper coated with silver chloride, succeeded in photographing the
images formed in a small camera
Daguerre experimented with photographing camera images directly onto a mirror-like silver-surfaced plate
that had been fumed with iodine vapor, which reacted with the silver to form a coating of silver iodide. As
with the bitumen process, the result appeared as a positive when it was suitably lit and viewed
Henry Fox Talbot In early 1839, he acquired a key improvement, an effective fixer, from his friend John
Herschel, a polymath scientist who had previously shown that hyposulfite of soda (commonly called
"hypo" and now known formally as sodium thiosulfate) would dissolve silver salts
John Herschel made the first glass negative, but his process was difficult to reproduce
Slovene Janez Puhar invented a process for making photographs on glass in 1841
Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion process.
Herbert Bowyer Berkeley experimented with his own version of collodion emulsions after Samman
introduced the idea of adding dithionite to the pyrogallol developer.

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