Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Photography

Starting point is 00:00:00 Prior to the 19th century, capturing images required the talent of an artist and a whole lot of time. The transition from capturing images as an art to that of a science took multiple innovations and discoveries. Those innovations never really stopped as images went from being captured physically to being captured digitally. Learn more about the history and evolution of cameras and photography and how we went from the first cameras to the camera in your smartphone on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past, wrong. ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR. The development of the camera

Starting point is 00:01:07 was sort of a chicken and egg thing. Both the camera and a light sensitive photographic medium needed to be developed for either one to make any sense. Before these two things came together to create photography as we know it, they had independent paths of development. It was only when they were both at a point that was developed enough that we could have photography. The development of the camera side of things was really the development of optics. The earliest discovery of something camera-like would have been the camera obscura. I covered this briefly in my episode on Vermeer,

Starting point is 00:01:37 but basically a pinhole in a very dark room will project the image out to the image out. the pinhole, into a room on the wall, upside down. The earliest known documentation of the camera obscure effect was actually made in the 4th century BC in China, so it's been known for a very long time. Likewise, lenses in some form existed for centuries. Simple spectacles were made in the 13th century, but lenses and the art of lens grinding really came into their own in the 16th and 17th centuries, and this is what allowed for the creation of telescopes and microscopes. The other big The theoretical discovery that was necessary was Isaac Newton's discovery that regular white light was actually made up of separate colors.

Starting point is 00:02:18 The camera obscure effect and the ability to bend light with lenses were obviously important, and the science of optics was developed first. But to make a photo, light had to be able to imprint onto something to make that image permanent. It had been known for centuries that certain silver compounds would darken when exposed to light. However, this was mostly just a curiosity. Moreover, no one really knew if it was light or heat which caused the change in color. The 18th century saw more investigations into these photosensitive chemicals.

Starting point is 00:02:48 The Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Schela discovered that silver chloride in particular was very sensitive to light. This discovery was first used by the English inventor Thomas Wedgwood around 1790 to create the first proto-photos. He created what was called photograms. These were nothing more than images created without a camera by place. placing objects directly on top of photosensitive paper. He would literally just put leaves and other things on the paper, expose them to light, and then would create an image with the shadows of what was put on top. This idea was then taken to its next logical step by using a photosensitive material

Starting point is 00:03:24 to make silhouettes out of people. But the next real step was to put all of these things together, to use the camera obscure effect to shine light onto a photosensitive plate to record the image of what was coming in through the pinhole. This happened for the first time in 1825. The French inventor, Joseph Nisapor Nyepp, used a camera obscura to expose light onto a sheet of pewter covered in bitumen. The world's oldest known photograph was taken by NEP in 1826.

Starting point is 00:03:53 The photo is known as the view from the window at Le Gras. It was an eight-hour exposure, and if you look at the photo, you can barely recognize it as a photo. However, if it's digitally enhanced, you can tell that it's roughly looking out of a window with some buildings outside and some grass. It wasn't much, but it was a start. Niep called his system heliography, and to be totally honest, it wasn't very practical. Exposures took hours, and the end product wasn't very good.

Starting point is 00:04:20 The next big advance was by another French inventor, Louis Degère. He invented a system known as the Degera type. Degra type is both the name of the process and the name of the final image. Degere introduced his process in 1839, and it was pretty much the photography system used over the next 20 years. The process involved a silver-plated piece of copper, which was highly polished to a mirror-like finish, and then it was exposed to halogen fumes to make it photosensitive, and it was later found that bromine exposure made it even more photosensitive.

Starting point is 00:04:51 After the exposure, the plate would then be developed by exposing it to mercury fumes, which was really dangerous. The original daguerreotypes were not transferred to paper, but were just displayed in their metal form. The daguerre type was eventually replaced by the amortem. emulsion plate or the wet plate. The main benefit of a wet plate is that allowed for a much shorter exposure time, usually only as much as two or three seconds. Wet plates were usually iron or glass, and if you've seen photos from the American Civil War, they were most probably done with

Starting point is 00:05:20 wet plates. Wet plates were much simpler to use than daguerre types. This period also saw the use of cameras with bellows in the front, which were used for focusing. There were numerous incremental advances made to cameras, including improved lenses and photographic plates. However, so long as plates were required, photography would still be something that was expensive and only for professionals. The next big development came from a name you might recognize, George Eastman. In 1885, he developed a dry gel that could be applied to paper, which could be used to expose images instead of a heavy plate. In 1889, he moved from paper to celluloid to make the first photographic film. And here I'll refer you to my episode on plastics and the role of early celluloid.

Starting point is 00:06:04 It was the development of film on celluloid, which allowed for the creation of motion pictures as well, but that's another story. In 1888, Eastman also introduced the world's first commercial camera, and he dubbed it the Kodak. In 1901, they introduced what would become a revolutionary camera that made photography for average people explode, the Kodak Brownie. All the techniques I've mentioned so far produced black and white photos. Late exposure would darken the photosensitive material, and that was it. The desire for color photos existed almost from the beginning, and the technique to create color photos was also known early on. The English physicist James Clerk Maxwell figured out that you just needed to take images with red, blue, and green filters and combine them to make a color image. The first color photo was taken with this method in 1861 by the English inventor Thomas Sutton, which is far earlier than most people suspect.

Starting point is 00:06:59 However, taking three different images with three different color filters was very difficult and very time-consuming. A simpler method for color photography wasn't developed until 1907 by August and Louis Lumiere, the same Lumiere brothers who helped popularize moving pictures. Their system was called the autocrome plate. Instead of three images, they created three layers of color filters on a single image plate. Each color would then be exposed slightly differently on each layer, and the end result would appear to be a color image. Color photography was still pretty rare and expensive until the development of the Kodak Kodachrome

Starting point is 00:07:35 film in 1935. Kodachrome used a subtractive method of capturing color removing yellow cyan and magenta rather than an additive system like the autocrome plates. Kodak Kodak Kodak Kodak Kodak film was produced for an incredibly long time. The last roles were discontinued only in 2009. I don't want to imply that photography advancement stopped in 19. because there were clearly continuous advancements in film, cameras, and lenses. However, photographic film fundamentals were pretty much the same for the next 75 years after Kota Chrome was developed.

Starting point is 00:08:09 Film formats like 35mm film changed, the form that film came in sometimes changed, but the basic chemical process didn't radically change. The next really big revolution in photography came from digital images. The idea of digital images actually came quite soon after the development of digital computers. Electronic images obviously had existed with televisions and with something called wire photos, which was a method of sending images over telegraph lines. In 1957, the first digital image was created when Russell Kirch of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology did a wire photo scan of a photo of his son. The resulting image was 176 by 176 pixels in size,

Starting point is 00:08:50 and it was black and white. While this was the first digital image, it wasn't the first digital camera. The ability to capture a digital image actually came about from the space program. As we sent probes to other planets, we couldn't very well put film cameras on the probes as there was no way to recover the film. The first interplanetary probes used a modified television camera, which captured an electronic analog image similar to how televisions worked. A big advance came with the development of the charge-coupled device, or CCD. A CCD is an array of capacitors that detects incoming photons. Each capacitor is called a pixel. As each pixel registers photons, it creates an electrical signal based on the wavelength and strength of the light that hits each pixel. The CCD was first developed

Starting point is 00:09:35 in 1969 at Bell Labs, and their work was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2009. CCDs are actually not used that much for digital images anymore. Newer image centers called active pixel sensors are used in modern smartphones, but the principle behind them is similar. The CMOS, or active pixel sensor was developed in 1993 by a team from the jet propulsion laboratory. CCDs are still found in very limited high-end applications where quality is an absolute must, like the cameras used on very large astronomical telescopes. Digital cameras have gotten much better over time. The quality of images you can get from a new smartphone is actually quite good. However, there will always be limits. I've had people ask me if a smartphone camera is as good as a more expensive

Starting point is 00:10:20 camera. The sensor on a smartphone camera is, given the form factor, very small. They've gotten better, but the fact remains that the light gathering area on such a sensor is always going to be small. The size of a sensor in a proper digital camera is going to be larger, and each light gathering pixel will be larger, thus gathering more light. The number of pixels a sensor has is usually measured in megapixels. While some cameras can have an absurd number of megapixels, unless you happen to be printing some very large images, anything more than about 10 to 14 megapixels is overkill. In fact, more megapixels can often make images lower in quality by reducing the size of each pixel on the physical sensor. One thing I'm sure that most of you are familiar with is digital file formats.

Starting point is 00:11:07 The most popular format is JPEG. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, which established the format in 1992. What it and almost every other digital image format does is compress the image so it has a smaller file size without dramatically diminishing quality. The way it does this is by condensing similar pixels. For example, in an uncompressed image, details regarding the color for each pixel are given. So it might say this pixel is black, this pixel is black, this pixel is black, and so on. In a compressed image, it would just store the information as pixels 1 through 7 are all black, which requires less space. Hence, the simpler an image is, the easier it is to compress.

Starting point is 00:11:49 Many new digital technologies haven't totally replaced their previous analog predecessors. In photography, however, that's exactly what has happened. Other than niche hobbyists, film has pretty much been totally replaced by digital photography. This has ensured that even though the roots of photography go back almost 200 years, it's still an area where there is significant investment and innovation today. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett.

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Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Photography

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