Who invented the camera? - News 24

The camera was invented over thousands of years by many people relying on each other.

Cameras these days are tiny devices that are an integral part of many portable devices. But the first cameras were massive and took hours to produce an image.

When was the camera invented?

The cameras we know today are the culmination of thousands of years of development.

They combine the idea of ​​projecting images with precision, discovered around 2,500 years ago, with the ability to save those images permanently, invented only 300 years ago.

Around 400 BC, Chinese philosophers discovered the camera obscura, which involves projecting an image onto a flat surface by forcing light through a small hole in a screen.

The projected image is an exact copy of the actual image, preserving size, color and perspective.

This is the idea behind the pinhole camera, which was developed in the Middle Ages as a progression of the camera obscura.

In 1685, German author Johann Zahn designed a portable camera but lacked the technology to make it.

In 1816, work began on the first photographic images; that is, capturing images projected by a pinhole camera onto surfaces treated with specific chemicals.

In 1839, these photographic images were made more durable, as the initial images had faded after about eight hours.

Then manufacturing made paper film more readily available in 1885, which meant that pictures could be made cheaply and sold, allowing mass commercialization of photography.

In 1918, personal cameras began to be marketed and became more widely available to the public as well as specialists and scientists.

However, it was still rare to own a camera until 1948 when Polaroid produced the first instant camera.

Then, in 1959, the first panoramic camera was invented by Thomas Sutton.

It wasn't until 1988 that the first digital camera was made, and Kodak introduced digital cameras to the mass market in 1991.

Who invented the camera?

The camera was invented by the efforts of many scientists over many years, working out how to project images and preserve them.

Mo-Ti, a Han dynasty Chinese philosopher, is said to be the first known person to project an image onto another surface using the pinhole camera principle – known as a camera obscurator.

Building on this work, Egyptian physicist Abu Ali Al-Hasan – also known as Ibn al-Haytham – invented the pinhole camera around 1000 AD.

He explored the idea of ​​creating an image while preserving color and perspective; the basic idea behind cameras today.

Nicéphore Niépce created the first experiment like the modern camera in 1826 because he invented a way to preserve the images he copied.

That said, he couldn't retain the footage for long, so his ideas were developed by many others before we had cameras as we know them today.

Richard Leach Maddox enabled the first portable cameras when he created the gelatin dry plate.

George Eastman created the Kodak camera, with a fixed focal length lens and a single shutter speed.

This camera was capable of taking 100 photos which had to be sent to Kodak to be developed into images.

In 1900, Eastman Kodak marketed the Brownie, invented by Frank A. Brownell, who brought the snapshot to the masses.

Oskar Barnack invented the first commercially successful cameras in 1913, the Leica cameras, and these were sold after World War I.

When was the first camera used?

The idea of ​​the modern camera was probably first used in 1826. It combined the pinhole idea of ​​projecting images with the ability to preserve them.

It is the French inventor, Nicéphore Niépce, who is credited as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in this field.

He invented heliography, which is an engraving process in which the image is obtained by photographic means.

Initially he used bulky materials such as bitumen and tin to capture the images, but later efforts using paper film probably come closest to the modern camera.

Niépce had difficulty with image fading, a problem that future inventors worked on and solved.

The first "films" consisted of a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride.

In 1839, the Daguerreotype device, with its indelible images, was invented by Louis Daguerre who worked with Niépce.

In 1840 Henry Fox Talbot followed this with the very similar Calotype camera.

Some also credit Alexander Wolcott with creating the first enduring images in 1840.

What is the oldest photo in the world?

The oldest photographic image is around 300 years old and was created by Niépce in 1826.

Niépce called the image "seen from the window of Le Gras", because it was of the tree and the roofs from his window in a French commune.

To preserve the image, he spread bitumen on a tin plate which he then left in a camera obscura.

After eight hours, the bitumen exposed to the light had hardened, so when he removed the soft bitumen, the image remained.