Just press a button the moment is caught frozen forever These images unite us remind us of our victories our tragedies our dreams but at the beginning of the 19th century Taking a photograph was just that a dream pursued by three very different men now the invention of photography the Quest to capture light on Modern Marvels you The camera we take it for granted today. There is a camera in almost every American home We don't think twice about how it works. We just aim focus and push a button This marvelous box brings a wide world into our hands, but the camera really isn't a very complicated device here's how it works When you focus the camera on an image light reflected from that image enters the lens Is inverted and makes an upSide-down picture on the film at the back of the camera we drop the film off for development? It's dipped in chemicals and a negative image appears from which pictures are printed Strangely enough a basic camera was used almost a thousand years ago In the 11th century Arabian astronomers used a camera to trace a path of the stars Their camera was a darkened room with a small hole in one wall on the wall opposite the hole you would see projected upside down the very image of What was outside the window and this discovery was called the camera? ObScura the word camera means room word Obscura in Italian means dark Camera, Obscura's became popular tools for artists it might surprise museum goers to know that by the 18th century many famous Painters trace their subjects with the camera, Obscura art began to call for to demand that a way be invented a way be devised that the Actual world reality could be recorded more faithfully than it had been recorded Before but the problem with drawing aids like the camera ObScura was that if the artists tracing the image wasn't very good the drawing wasn't very good cameras made a perfect reflection of light But how great an achievement to make the image permanent? The invention of photography would demand more than an artist desire it would require a scientists Curiosity simply stated photography could never be possible without some understanding of chemical reaction to light Over 3,000 years ago early civilizations noticed that sunlight faded fabrics, but they didn't know why? Centuries would pass before a very important discovery was made about chemical sensitivity to life in the 1700s Johann Heinrich Schultz was working with silver chloride when he realized that the silver particles changed color after exposure to sunlight And he would make little experimental most games for his friends where he would take a flask and fill it full of this solution of chalk and Silver chloride and he put the stencil on the flask Hold it in the light for a while then take the paper away in presenting the silver blackened off the dyes in relation to light Though he took it no further Schultz's discovery would become a basic principle of photography the tools for creating an image were now known The early 1800s were a time of prolific invention and in the dawn of the industrial revolution There were great races to patent and protect one's ideas in Central France a modest inventor would make a giant Contribution to the development of the still camera though He was trying to invent something very different in a French village near Paris in 1816 Joseph, Nisa Forney Epps, became interested in refining the new art of lithography in order to make copies of pre-existing works of art But he needed drawings in order to do experiments and knee-ups couldn't draw for beans He decided to make his drawings with the aid of light an idea far more difficult than refining lithography in fact it had stumped many great minds before his knee EPps built a tiny camera Obscura a little over 1 inch wide on each side he knew about Schultz's experiments with light-sensitive silver So he pinned paper soaked in silver chloride into the back of his camera He was thrilled to get an image on the paper The lights and darks were reversed and he had no idea how to make a print or normal-looking picture from it Six years of tedious experimentation passed while he puzzled over better methods of creating a good image In july of 1822 Kniepp stumbled upon a solution he knew that artists use an asphalt compound in lithography Nibs coated a plate with asphalt instead of silver placed a translucent image on the plate and exposed it to the sun It was a radical idea and it worked He could Copy Works of art in the summer of 1826 an even greater Triumph would come He used a crude camera, obscure that he had and he put the plate in the back of the camera ObScura stuck it out the window of his studio and exposed it to the view out there for eight hours The result what many consider the world's first photograph was the view from the attic window of his country house? Kniepp scald his invention heliography Shortly after his discovery neves received a letter from a stranger in Paris who to kniepp Sehorne knew about his experiments The stranger wanted to know kniepp secret in creating heliographs and claimed that he too was working on making pictures from light Nee Epps was afraid his ideas might be stolen He did some nosing around and discovered that the letter writer who signed his name De Guerre was a respected parisian artist nee epps. Wrote a courteous reply, but did not reveal his technique Shortly after he received the letter nee epps was compelled to make a trip to London on His stopover in Paris he decided on impulse to meet this stranger named de Guerre Louise shot mon.
De Guerre was not only an artist But the Joint owner in a popular gallery called the diorama the Diorama was like Grauman's Chinese theatre in Hollywood a place that everybody knew about it was a Mecca for tourists it was a Cornucopia of money it was highly profitable and it made him famous Spectators watched with amazement as large pictorial views appeared to dissolve into other landscapes through the effect of lights on lightly painted canvas De Guerre used a camera, Obscura to draw correct perspectives on his huge paintings he bought his camera lenses from the same optician who sold lenses to nyet in fact it was the Optician who had told de Guerre of nee epps experiments with a camera. They finally met in January of 1827 We know to go to be very charming man in part of the theater world? He knew how to smooth palms and get his own way and so on. I think yes was quite impressed Knee appeared on to London where he found that a reversal and family fortune had almost bankrupted him He became even more determined to carry on his experiments with a camera and equally determined was Louis Daguerre Paris Showman Nipson de Guerre would shortly become partners in a race that would end in greatness for one and obscurity for the other Before cameras inexpensive portraits were made by cutting silhouettes a process sarcastically named after friends finance minister at the end the silhouette who had proposed Taxing the rich so heavily that only their outline would remain the camera will return in a moment on Modern Marvels we now return to the camera on Modern Marvels the Two men who raced toward the discovery of photography were a study in contrasts joseph nee epps was modest for light and trusting Louis Daguerre was a showman in something of a hustler Nips possessed a strong scientific background while de Guerre had little formal education Even so de Guerre was obsessed with the idea of fixing an image in a camera But he was hindered in pursuing research by his ignorant of chemistry and physics When he learned of knee-ups experiments to gare was even more motivated to pursue the same idea The Garret knee up Several charming notes after their first meeting in Paris He spoke of his continuing research into making images in the camera But to get I think had kind of fooled yep into thinking that he'd got a lot third within experiments than he actually had At the end of two years in 1829 nips made a new breakthrough and sent the results to the gare knee ePps had Succeeded in making a still life in his little camera in the accompanying note nEv spoke of his intention to Publish his work Together leave there was money to be made and he wanted a piece of the pie He urged nips to delay publication until the process could be perfected He also offered his collaboration and claimed to have a camera lens three times as fast as knee abscess That claim would turn out to be a great exaggeration, but nips was convinced by Daguerre's arguments. He agreed not to publish his findings Nieves was now 64 years old tired and impoverished he had worked alone for 13 years And he believed he could not advance the work further without a perfected lens The gare in Stark contrast was 42 in the prime of life energetic and confident that heliography could become as successful as the diorama Sims in the expert would be a good idea to hook up with this entrepreneurial Younger man Who's already quite a famous figure in Paris and who was well-connected, but perhaps of the collaboration? This would be a better way to go then experimenting on his own The gear traveled to nips home and the two men signed a 10-year partnership But over the next four years working separately neither man made breakthroughs Then in 1833 without warning me apps died of a stroke His great contribution to photography remained unpublished His deaths were so large that his son is ador was forced to sell the family estate However is a door inherited his father's interest in the partnership with Daguerre 2 years after nice death his son Isadora received an urgent letter from the gear at long last a gear had made a revolutionary Discovery it found a new method to obtain an image from the camera the Gear chemically treated a silver plate and placed the plate in the camera but instead of leaving the plate there until an image appeared he took it out immediately and heated it over Mercury Vapors an Image soon developed what we call a latent image It was an astounding finding that would change the course of photography yet.
No record remains of what led the gear to this discovery We like to think that Discoveries are by geniuses who cry Eureka after a moment of flash of inspiration? But I think the in fact the invention was a somewhat gradual one Is it Arnie epps? Rush to Paris to gare handed kniepp Son a new contract to sign it changed the name of the firm from knee apps to gear to the gear nians again Inherited all of the notebooks and research of his partner and and those notebooks were valuable And allowed to gasps who was himself an artist and not a scientist to actually go ahead and Successfully make a photograph as we know it today in his theatrical Style the gear publicly announced his discovery But his announcement was premature a major problem remained He could develop an image, but he could not make that image permanent. If it was exposed to further sunlight, the image would fade away It would have disturbed the gear tremendously if he had known that He was not the only man closing in on a solution to this great riddle in fact a 31 year old Englishman named William Henry Fox Talbot was working on the very same idea Until the Honeymoon trip to Northern Italy in 1832 he had tried to use drawing aids including the camera ObScura and another gadget called camera, Lucida Capture the Natural beauty of Lake Como Camera Lucida used a prism to reflect the artist subjects onto a piece of paper Talbott traced the reflection at his hotel and the Lake and he looked at the drawings he made and because he was a smart man and Essentially a pragmatic man. He said to himself these drawings are terrible these are terrible Was a magical moment and on that magical moment He got a brilliant an insight that wouldn't it be wouldn't it be extraordinary To be able to make permanent the drawings that he was making with the camera Lucida unaware of nee absented Gars work Talbot began to experiment with tiny cameras We have to realize that Tolbert wasn't just a kind of arbitrary tinkerer This is a man who was probably as well educated that any man in Europe was at this time His strong background in chemistry and optics guided his experiments aware of silver Sensitivity to life Talbot worked diligently until he achieved a breakthrough He soaked paper in a salt solution Then silver nitrate and exposed the paper with an object laid on it to the sun Talbott was immediately able to produce an image on paper which he called a shadow graph Immediately he said I've discovered how to fix a shadow isn't that a wonderful phrase his he created a new art But Talbot was just beginning in 1835 he made an even more important discovery in his notebook He wrote of exposing paper in his little camera for several hours to obtain a shadow graph for negative image The lights and Darks were reversed He laid that shadow graph on another chemically treated piece of paper exposed it to the sun and created a copy The lights and darks were now normal it is what we consider a positive or print? His first print was a latticework window at Lata Gabby his country home amazingly He did not understand the magnitude of his discovery Talbot set aside the notebooks that contained his great invention and turned his attention to other scholarly pursuits less than 200 miles away De Guerre continue to work obsessively in his laboratory across the channel he tried chemical after chemical on his silver plates De Guerre was determined to fix the image in the camera so that it would not fade He would not leave his lab for days on end He neglected his business and his family after two more years of struggle in 1837 to Guaran ounce that he had found the solution The Garrigan sent for ISadora when Isadora arrived in Paris to gare triumphantly revealed his discovery the method to gear discovered was oddly simple After obtaining an image on the plate to garibay the plate in a salt solution which stopped the chemical reaction on the picture? Joseph Nee Epps's work was critical to Daguerre's discovery would only be credited with the earlier chemical process The magnificent invention would be named after de Guerre alone. He called his pictures daguerreotype Me up, son, Isadora was furious He told a friend all his conduct has been nothing, but a heap of shameful and despicable Charlatan ism Is it or felt that his father had been dishonored but the gare insisted that his photochemical process was different from knee amps in The end Isadora signed the new contract agreeing to all of Daguerre's terms in the hope of receiving some compensation if any money were made De Guerre Conveyed his incredible findings to the french academy of science the academy announced a gars discovery though Not in detail to the world in January of 1839 In the previous four years the Englishman William talbot had experimented no further with his camera His mind was far from his shadow graphs when he read of Daguerre's Invention in the London times two weeks after the invention had been announced Talbot was horrified that Daguerre was receiving credit for a process talbot believed he himself had discovered He immediately resurrected his old experiments made a few new ones and two weeks later on January 25th of 1839 which is that what I call the birthday of photography Talbot made a presentation to a group of people - mostly scientists in London Where the first public exhibition of photographs was made? Talbots contributions in developing a negative positive process were critical to photography as it is used today But those contributions would bring him no financial gain little reward and a great deal of trouble The gear on the other hand would be the one to gain great fame In August 1839 Daguerre's photographic process was announced to the French academy the audience was thrilled Within the hour of men rushed to the nearest chemists shop Stu purchase materials and try to make daguerreotype the French government awarded the gare an annuity of 7,000 francs and to kniepp, Son, Isadora 5,000 to the Guerra type soon became enormous, ly popular They printed handbooks and manuals describing how to make a daguerreotype and these handbooks and manuals were translated into a dozen languages immediately shipped around the world and Very quickly the Derry-o types were being made in Practically every city that was itself also a trading port the government encouraged a gare to continue his research But he knew his greatest achievement was behind him he retired to a small city outside Paris where he puttered in his garden The Gare died of a heart attack in 1851.
He was 64 years old so de Guerre is the ancestor of One line of photography which is instant photography which is the polaroid process and all? Processes like it the world was ready to receive the gars invention the gazette. De France predicted photography would revolutionize the art of drawing but problems remained exposure times were unacceptably slow the equipment was bulky and Impractical the chemicals noxious great minds went to work to find the solutions But arum photography means to draw with life it comes from the greek post meaning life and graphene meaning to draw the camera will return in a moment on Modern Marvels We now return to the camera on Modern Marvels But in the first year of Daguerre and Talbots discoveries amateur photographers began karting their heavy equipment to the far reaches of the globe photography had arrived from athens to Egypt Exotic and Faraway places were captured and brought home Photography was not a hobby for the weak of heart Each glass plate used in a daguerreotype camera could easily weigh a pound or more depending on its size Chemicals and sealed glass bottles heavy tripods and other paraphernalia made the equipment awkward and Unwieldy In France there was great enthusiasm For Daguerre's marvellous new invention, but the public soon grew disappointed with photography's limitations in making portraits Cruel looking metal stands were designed with arms that clamp the poseurs had in place The subject was required to sit perfectly still for as long as a quarter of an hour usually indirect layering sunlight While this portrait was being taken One satirical magazine of the time made fun of the gears process you want to make a portrait of your wife You fix her head in a temporary iron collar to get the indispensable Immobility you point the lens of the camera at her face and when you take the portrait It doesn't represent your wife it is her parrot or water and powder The difficulty in taking portraits was just one drawback in early photography the plate was developed incorrectly the image faded Papers used for printing were often flawed the chemical stank and were toxic, but there was money to be made Incentive to improve the invention was very strong William Talbot returned to the research he had abandoned four years earlier. He knew his original process was slow and imperfect soon He came up with an important improvement by exposing wet instead of dry paper in the camera for a short time He could develop an image of the paper afterwards through further chemical treatment the process was faster in the image box sharper Calvin named photographs made by this process Calla types Greek for beautiful pictures his mother advised him to call them talbot types and did so herself until the day she died This faster chemical process Talbot could not make portraits His 1840 photograph of his wife constance is one of the oldest surviving Calotype portraits She sat for it only five stiff minutes Over the next two decades talbot continued to make improvements in developing and fixing photographs But he was never to enjoy financial success from his invention though. He tried to protect his ideas Talbot did the unusual Instead of sharing with the world at large his discovery as a miracle that had been given by Nature or by God He patented the process he became embroiled in a number of nasty lawsuits over others rights to use his Processes he lost most of the suits later in his life talbot would give up photography entirely in 1877 he died of Heart failure at Latoque Abbey in Several obituaries his contribution to the invention of photography was barely mentioned Of course there was always rivalry between France and britain about witches and had come up with the invention but talbot has been a widely recognized as the Founding figure for the kind of photography we use today paper-based negative by positive photography in that respect told that is definitely the founding As portraits became possible public demand for them grew quickly and a wide variety of people Though it may seem strange today requests for portraits of family members who had died were not uncommon? Death rates in the 1800s were very high especially among children Sometimes the dead were propped up in chairs or their bodies positioned in lifelike poses This practice was discontinued by the turn of the century when for health reasons Austria And other countries finally banned families from taking Dead children to portrait studios In the United States daguerreotype portraits were extremely popular in the 1850s gallery sprang up everywhere Well, it's hard for twentieth-century people to realize quite.
How amazing it was to experience in daguerreotype for the first time so in the 1840s they came in these beautiful leather packages like a jewel piece of jewelry in fact when you opened up and you Saw the image which of course is on a silver plate it flashes that you like a beautiful jewel celebrities judges Ordinary Folks and Presidents all sat for portraits in 1864 Abraham Lincoln posed for the American Portraitist Matthew Brady We all have a copy of that photograph and most of us don't know it. It's the portrait on the $5 bill Just as quickly as portrait photography became possible erotica became popular as with painting and sculpture photographers immediately began to pose nudes both for artistic and pornographic purposes From 1840 to the early 1860s the daguerreotype had a glorious run But by the mid 1860s its day had passed The plates were so fragile they had to be sealed under glass protected from damaging fingerprints or oxidation the Garret types did not duplicate well in a portrait by a reputable salon could cost as much as $1000 at today's prices, but more importantly something came along to take their place Frederick Scott archer an English Sculptor made an improvement in photography so significant that most photographers Abandoned both the daguerreotype, and the Calotype in his favor Archer called his process collodion. He coated glass plates with a compound made of dumb cotton and ether Unlimited prints could be made from the glass plates and the images were pin sharp The collodion process would dominate until the 1880s when dry plates would replace it but despite these improvements photography continued to be a cumbersome and Elusive, Hobby the early chemistry was for the most part fairly toxic people who became ill deranged and and otherwise sick from from constant exposure to different kind of photographic processes and in fumes Revolutionary Advances would have to wait for visionaries to rethink the camera itself One young man would claim that vision and be responsible for the prototype of what we think of as the camera today? Identifying criminals with photographs was popular with law enforcement and collectors in 1876 Photographers sold over 50,000 silver near prints of Jesse James Gang After they were killed in a bank robbery attempt the camera will return in a moment on Modern Marvels We now return to the camera on Modern Marvels Photography was not an invention born in perfection, but by a second decade many hobbyists had improved the process Exposure times were shorter lenses faster In the next 20 years even more astonishing changes would come and they would allow the camera to be used in surprising ways Camera bodies were designed in a wide array of shapes and configurations Some cameras were designed to use both the Gara type and calotype acts Others had an accordion bellows so that the subject could be kept in focus at various distances studio cameras varied in size from small to bigger than a man Stereoscopic cameras became very popular Paired images viewed through a stereoscope became fused into one image in the mind and gave a startling illusion of three dimensions Many inventors focused on ways to make photography more profitable Andre Diaz Dairy a parisian designed an ingenious camera in 1854 that a lot of to eight exposures or negatives to be taken on one plate He called them. Cod a visit or calling cards.
They were wildly popular and cheap to make photographs of famous people like Princess Alexandra of Wales sold like Hotcakes In the second decade of photography abroad world was captured with a range of cameras But one subject had not yet been chronicled the arena of war in 1855 the Crimean War was raging on the North Coast of the Black sea Roger Fenton an English lawyer turned photographer set sail for balaclava Harbor with 36 crates of photographic equipment weighing thousands of pounds His plates were so slow fenton could only film before or after battle he developed his pictures in intensely sweltering heat in a wine merchants carriage he had converted into a darkroom his war photograph shocked people a Few Years later Americans would get the same dose of reality From the Battlefield of Gettysburg to cold harbor Fredericksburg to Chancellorsville mathew Brady and other cameramen would yield heavy wagons of photographic equipment? Close behind the battle lines and sometimes inadvertently on the Battle Lines their photographs documented with great eloquence the dead the dying and every Phase of the American Civil war In the decade after the civil war the development of dry plates and the invention of fast mechanical shutters finally allowed Photographers to record motion accurately that would turn out to be highly profitable for Leland Stanford Stanford a former California Governor no Racehorse Enthusiast made a $20,000 bet with a friend in 1873 But all for the horses hooves left the ground at the same time during a gallop but not in the manner in which artists depicted them Stanford turned to a camera to prove his theory Stanford hired Eadweard Muybridge a british photographer living in San Francisco to Settle the question Motivated by his fascination with motion photography muybridge had invented a fast mechanical shutter in 1877 Muybridge Line 24 cameras in a row few paces apart in the track at Leland's farm in Palo Alto, California each camera Shutter mechanism was controlled by a string and as the horse Went down the track it broke the string and picked four shutter and you got an image of the horse in that particular position the photograph showed Beyond a doubt that a horse's hooves did indeed all come off the ground at the same time in his gallop and in an unlikely place under the horse's belly Stanford won his bet Muybridge is shots of Progressive action heralded a new direction in photography as with the ideas of a young man in upstate, New York A Young bank clerk in Rochester New York took up photography as a hobby in the 1870s the clerk's name was George, Eastman Eastman's Father had died when the boy was 14 and poverty forced George to go to work Eastman loved tinkering By his 20s his routine was to work in the bank during the day and in his photography lab at night He was determined to invent a dry film emulsion made of Gelatin which hobbyists thought would be more Practical than the chemicals in use at the time After some months of experimenting he came up with a workable emulsion he designed a coating machine to apply it to the plate Eastman took money from his savings and sailed for England where he applied for patents for both his emulsion and coding machine The Emulsion sold Modestly well but more importantly Eastman was building a reputation for reliability That reputation would be important when he embarked on a new pursuit designing a flexible base to replace the photographic plate in 1884 after two more years of constant experimentation Eastman began selling a paper base he called film he also designed a holder from which to roll the paper Film's weight and flexibility were wonderful but developing it was tricky because the emulsion had to be carefully peeled from the base It also sold Modestly Eastman continued to develop new ideas and to market them in 1888. He sailed to england again to patent a trademark name He'd been mulling over for quite some time He was trying to find a name that was an incredibly memorable that you couldn't forget. He couldn't confuse it with anything else that Would satisfy all patent laws in a variety of different countries and which he himself said because of the two continents kodak it sounded like the click of a camera shutter so that would always remind you of in fact what the company was associated with The first product Eastman introduced under the name Kodak would change the course of photography It was a camera half the size of a shoebox 22 ounces in weight It wasn't the first small camera by any means smaller camera bodies had been introduced by various companies in the 1880s but Eastman added something ingenious a 50-Foot Roll of Film capable of making a hundred exposures Loaded with film the camera costs too steep $25 but Eastman stroke of genius was that for $10 his company would process the film Reload the camera and return the camera and prints to the customer He marketed this whole process under the slogan you press the button We do the rest and this was his you know why he revolutionized the whole business because the most unskilled amateur could now take photographs The Kodak camera went on the market in july of 1888 in six months to Eastman's astonishment he had sold 2500 and set a course for the future of photography in the next century Kodak cameras would be offered in every shape size and color imaginable a Camera marketed for children was called the Brownie camera targeted at women included a lipstick and compact Eastman's Company would reach into every arena of amateur and professional photography Kodak became the household name and photographic supplies, and it is to this day Eastman is real genius Lay in his business sense his advertising campaigns were brilliant his Advertising constantly played on ideas of memory and desire and loss The idea that if one didn't take a photograph one would lose this memory and with it your entire child childhood if you like Eastman's pioneering achievements in photography would extend to other mediums as well his work in film was in no small measure responsible for an invention on another frontier the moving picture New lenses new cameras and a new century would bring great changes to the way people use photography but a large disappointment remained how to turn a black and white world into color An early advertisement for the kodak camera boasted it is now easy for any person of ordinary intelligence to learn to take good photographs in ten minutes Modern Marvels will return We now return to Modern Marvels As the 19th century drew to a close The evolution of the camera and of chemical processes allowed photography to expand further into science and business Police work x-Rays and news photography were just some of its uses People readily accepted photography's usefulness, but few accepted it as art in Fact most early photographers did not see themselves as artists but a few visionaries like Julia Margaret Cameron Took photography to a higher level in the 1860s Cameron set out to create portraits that were art She used dramatic lighting and borrowed ideas from the Classics She converted a chicken coop into a darkroom and composed personal dramatic portraits of her friends Among his subjects were the scientist Darwin the Poet Tennyson and the Alice who as a child had inspired Lewis Carroll's alice in Wonderland I. Think she is one of the greatest of geniuses in the 19th century and in the whole history of photography Critics mocked her soft focus.
She never made a profit and her work laying in obscurity for many years after her death Photography would not find a welcoming place in art galleries until the 20th century its acceptance was due in large part to Alfred Stieglitz a photographer Collector and critic Stieglitz opened a small gallery in New York in 1905 and for 30-something years exhibited photograph side by side with great contemporary Works of art Stiglitz believe profoundly That a photograph could be as important to work of art as any painting or any sculpture that he had had ever seen It is clear from the works of Daga Delacroix and other turn-of-the-century painters that they drew inspiration from photography The notion of photography as art came slowly By the 1880s the camera had become a powerful political and social tool in the hands of some documentarians the homeless and recent immigrants were the subjects of both Jacob wiese a New York photographer in the 1890s and of Lewis hine a decade later Hynes photographs of children and sweatshops helped Initiate the passage of child labor laws in the dust bowls of the midwest and the migrant camps of the far West dorothea lange Walker Evans And other government photographers recorded rural lives displaced by drought and poverty during the great depression In its first 50 years the camera had been very limited by lighting conditions the invention of Flash Powder changed all that in 1887 But it was not without danger It also called people's hair on fire put acrid smoke in the air and occasionally Exploded the flashbulb would not come into common use until the 1930s to tidy things up a bit with all the ingenious improvements in photography why was the invention of colours such a Diabolically difficult task the concept that colours could be made from three primary colors had been demonstrated by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861 the problem was of course how to find a way to capture these three primary or secondary colors on a piece of film two Parisian Brothers Claude and Louis lumire would make an ingenious breakthrough in color in 1904 They died separate batches of tiny granules of potato starch in one of the three primary colors They combined the different color granules on film the granules of potato starch acted like Miniature filters their film Autochrome rendered exquisite colors, but was expensive and had limited sensitivity to light Only a handful of professional photographers used it Eastman's research Department had explored color film for two decades without much success but the invention of 35 millimeter film still photography and motion pictures would light a fire under the company there was money to be made I. Think it was a major kind of engineering. Task to figure out how to do it and certainly the incentive of 35-Millimeter I think is what? What forced the companies Forced Kodak to? Find a way to make color practical kodak marketed A 35-millimeter color slide film in 1932 but Eastman did not live to see it in 1931 Eastman turned 78 He was wealthy Beyond his dreams a friend of the powerful and famous a man of eclectic tastes He loved big-game hunting and Elegant dinners camping and classical music After his 78th birthday a party was given for Eastman at his home Shortly after the guests left his secretary heard a gunshot and rushed upstairs Eastman had ended his life with a bullet to his brain the father of the modern Photographic process left a note that said only my work is done wai-wait within two decades a young man is keen in his business on cheese's George, Eastman as Visionary as Henry Ford would bring photography full circle to its beginning Edwin land a Harvard freshman in the 1920s was walking down Broadway in New York City on a college trip The marquee Lights dazzled him so did the headlights of the cars wishing by at that moment He got an idea that would set the course of his entire career What if a filter could be designed that would cut the glare of the Car's headlights? Land immediately took a leave of absence from Harvard he worked intensely for three years in a makeshift lab in New York City Finally he achieved his goal He was able to make an artificial material that allowed only light rays moving in One direction through it a term called Polarizing the results. No more glare the kodak company immediately saw the materials potential as a camera filter in 1934 Kodak signed a contract with land.
He was in business Land clearly wasn't thinking about the camera when he made this discovery even so he had just laid the groundwork for a stunning breakthrough in Photography a breakthrough that land himself would make a decade later Lands greatest invention would come to him in the same flash of insight his original idea had taken land was on a family trip to Santa fe New Mexico in 1944 when his three-year-old daughter asked why she had to wait to see a photograph he had taken of her in that moment. He Visualized the elements that be needed in a camera that could make a photograph almost instantaneously He immediately realized that his life's work in plastics and polarizers had laid the basis for the invention of an instantly Developing photograph, but it would take three years of research to develop the idea into a workable prototype lands film consisted of a positive and negative sheet with chemical seal in between When the photographer pulled the exposed film through the rollers at the back of the camera the chemicals spread across both sheets processing and developing the film within minutes in 1948 the first land camera was sold for 8950 at Jordan Marsh in Boston over five million were purchased in the first year today Polaroid cameras are popular around the world oddly enough Polaroid pictures which are direct positives are the modern equivalent of the daguerreotype the story of the camera had come full circle? The first pictures took 8 hours to make Today a picture takes a fraction of a second we use photography to push nearly every scientific frontier It's hard to imagine at this point in time a world without Photography, I think it's changed the entire kind of human consciousness of the way that we look at and perceive and and deal with the Real World The vision of so many centuries ago to capture the reflected image of light Is this magical today as it was then and it is possible through a simple, but ingenious? Invention but kamilly.
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