Cameras

1. In the mid-1820s, Niépce used a sliding wooden box camera made by Parisian opticians Charles and Vincent Chevalier to experiment with photography on surfaces thinly coated with Bitumen of Judea.
2. After Niépce’s death in 1833, his partner Louis Daguerre continued to experiment and by 1837 had created the first practical photographic process, which he named the daguerreotype and publicly unveiled in 1839.
3. Henry Fox Talbot perfected a different process, the calotype, in 1840. Both used cameras that were little different from Zahn’s model, with a sensitized plate or sheet of paper placed in front of the viewing screen to record the image. Focusing was generally via sliding boxes.
4. Collodion dry plates had been available since 1855, thanks to the work of Désiré van Monckhoven, but it was not until the invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox that they rivaled wet plates in speed and quality.
5. The use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing paper film in 1885 before switching to celluloid in 1889.
6. His first camera, which he called the “Kodak,” was first offered for sale in 1888.
7. In 1900, Eastman took mass-market photography one step further with the Brownie, a simple and very inexpensive box camera that introduced the concept of the snapshot.
8. The Brownie was extremely popular and various models remained on sale until the 1960s.
9. He built his prototype 35 mm camera (Ur-Leica) around 1913, though further development was delayed for several years by World War I.
10. Leitz test-marketed the design between 1923 and 1924, receiving enough positive feedback that the camera was put into production as the Leica I (for Leitz camera) in 1925.
11. Kodak got into the market with the Retina I in 1934, which introduced the 135 cartridge used in all modern 35 mm cameras.
12. Although the Retina was comparatively inexpensive, 35 mm cameras were still out of reach for most people and rollfilm remained the format of choice for mass-market cameras. This changed in 1936 with the introduction of the inexpensive Argus A and to an even greater extent in 1939 with the arrival of the immensely popular Argus C3.
13. Although the cheapest cameras still used rollfilm, 35 mm film had come to dominate the market by the time the C3 was discontinued in 1966.
14. The fledgling Japanese camera industry began to take off in 1936 with the Canon 35 mm rangefinder, an improved version of the 1933 Kwanon prototype.
15. The first practical reflex camera was the Franke & Heidecke Rolleiflex medium format TLR of 1928.