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| Focus the flower of your eye, the camera lens never lies... |
A very general look at a timeline and of media from photography to video and it's impact. The history of visual media is rich and varied, and future blog posts will cover much of what is below in more detail and additional historical points and personalities.
4th Century BC - Aristotle described the principles of the camera obscura. Through a camera obscura’s pinhole, the image of the world is reversed or upside-down. He observed and noted how light passing through small openings, like those between tree leaves, projected images, thereby laying the groundwork for future photographic development.
11th Century - Alhazen (also known as Ibn al-Haytham) was a scientist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, wrote the Book of Optics, and invented a wooden box camera obscura as well as a version of the pinhole camera.
1717 - Johann Heinrich Schulze (who by some sources has been recognized as the inventor of photography), used a light sensitive slurry (comprised of chalk and nitric acid - in which silver had been dissolved into) to capture images of cut out letters on a bottle as the silver, exposed to sunlight, darkened. The results were not permanent.
1800 - More substantial shadow imagery was captured on coated paper and leather by Thomas Wedgwood (who produced Photograms) and Humphry Davy (who pioneered enlargement of images with the usage of a solar camera).
1827 - Nicephore Niepce, developer of the process of heliography (which is the hardening of bitumen in sunlight to produce an image), used it to capture the oldest and earliest known surviving photograph of nature, "View from the Window at Le Gras". Early standards of photolithography and photogravure, both developed by Niepce, with usage of the camera obscura, paved an even wider path to modern photography.
1839 - Louis Daguerre, an associate of Niepce, created the first publicly available photographic process, the Daguerreotype. It fell out of favor within twenty years of it's debut, but has found a rebirth of sorts that began with artists using the technique in the late 20th century.
1850 - Ambrotype became a more cost friendly option, invented by Frederick Scott Archer, that replaced Daguerreotype. A "rogues gallery" of images of both wanted and imprisoned criminals, was created by the New York City Police Dept in 1858.
1889 - Flexible roll film, allowing multiple photos one after another, and the Kodak camera by George Eastman, made photography very accessible to the general public.
1900 - Video cameras were made for broadcast media. In the 1900s image transmission was experimented with. John Logie Baird added to this with his invention of a “Nipkow disk,” a mechanical device that breaks an image into “scanlines” using a rotating disc with holes cut into it.
1930 - In early television mechanical video images were being produced however, by the 1930s new all-electronic designs based on a cathode-ray video camera tube were accomplished by engineers Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zsworykin who replaced the mechanical variations with electron scanning technology. This soon became the standard for television industry and remained in wide use until the 1980s.
1933 - The first single-lens reflex camera (SLR) using 127 roll film came out, followed by the debut of a shutter activated flash socket.
1936 - The first appearance of the Kine Exata camera that used 35mm film.
1956 - The Ampex VRX-1000 was the first commercially successful VCR, and used a 2 inch wide tape, coming in a price of $50,000.
1957 - Russel Kirsch et al scans the first photographs by digital acquisition while at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards.
1970 - JVC and Panasonic develop the first self contained large format video cassette tapes, leading to the wide rise of usage in the 1980s with various forms of the video camcorder.
1974 - VHS and Betamax vcr formats fuel the revolution of home video recording and later rentals. Movies such as "E.T." or "Raiders of the Lost Ark" were priced around $130.
1981 - The transition from analog to digital video capture began in 1981 with the development of the Sony Mavica single-lens camera. This camera utilized a rotating magnetic disc, which was 2 inches in diameter and could record up to 50 still frames for playback or printing.
1986 - Kodak scientists invent the world's first megapixel sensor.
1990 - Adobe Photoshop 1.0 is released February 19, and was an exclusive to the Macintosh platform.
1997 - First publicly shared picture via a cell phone happens.
2005 - YouTube went online in February, with the first video upload on April 23, titled "Me at the zoo" showing co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video can still be viewed on YouTube and has 351 million views, and 10,400, 992 comments as of March 7th 2025.
2008 - The beginning of companies such as Polaroid and Kodak discontinuing film types for purchase, citing the rise of digital cameras and memory cards.
2018 - Kodak resumes the production of Ektachrome film.
