CHAPTER ONE

CAMERA OBSCURA
A camera obscura was one of the most important devices ever created in the world of photography. It is an optical device that led to the camera. A camera obscura consists of a box or room with a hole in one side. Light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where it is reproduced, rotated 180 degrees upside-down, but with color and perspective contained. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation.
Did you know he largest camera obscura in the world is on Constitution Hill in Aberystwyth, Wales?
The first surviving mention of some of the principles behind the pinhole camera or camera obscura belongs to Mozi who lived 470 to 390 BCE. Mozi was a Chinese philosopher and the founder of Mohism. He correctly asserted that the image in a camera obscura is flipped upside down because light travels in straight lines from its source. His disciples developed this into a minor theory of optics. The Greek philosopher Aristotle lived from 384 to 322 BCE, understood the optical principle of the pinhole camera. Aristotle viewed the crescent shape of a partially eclipsed sun projected on the ground through the holes in a sieve and through the gaps between the leaves of a plane tree. In the 4th century, Greek scholar Theon of Alexandria observed that "candlelight passing through a pinhole will create an illuminated spot on a screen that is directly in line with the aperture and the center of the candle."

LOUIS DAGURRE
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was born on November 18, 1787, in Cormeilles, near Paris, France. He was a French painter and physicist who invented the first practical process of photography, known as the daguerreotype. Though the first permanent photograph from nature was made in 1826/27 by Nicéphore Niépce of France, it was of bad quality and required around 8 hours of exposure time. The process that Daguerre developed required only 20 to 30 minutes. Louis died July 10, 1851.
On Jan. 9, 1839, announced at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences by the eminent astronomer and physicist François Arago, a full description of his daguerreotype process was presented. Daguerre was appointed an officer of the Legion of Honour.
The distinguishing visual characteristics of a daguerreotype are that the image is on a bright (ignoring any areas of tarnish) mirror-like surface of metallic silver and depending on the lighting conditions it will appear either positive or negative, and whether a light or dark background is being reflected in the metal. From certain angles the image cannot be seen at all.

Joseph Nieppe Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce was born on March 7th , 1765 in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. Joseph was a French inventor who was the first to make a permanent photographic image. He died on July 5, 1833. Nieppe and his brother Claude invented an internal-combustion engine in 1807. They called this the Pyreolophore. They explained that the word was a combination of Greek words, they used such as “fire” “wind and “I produce.” It was not until 1813 where lithography became a hobby where they lived in France.
He then began to experiment with the then-novel printing technique. Nieppe was unskilled in drawing, and unable to obtain proper lithographic stone locally, however he sought a way to provide images automatically. He coated pewter with various light-sensitive substances in an effort to copy superimposed engravings in sunlight. From this he progressed in April 1816 to attempts at photography, which he called heliography which essentially sun drawing, with a camera. Nieppe then recorded a view from his workroom window on paper sensitized with silver chloride but was only partially able to fix the image.

William Henry Fox Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot was born on 11 February 1800 in Melbury, Dorset. Sadly his father died when he was less than a year old and he and his mother lived in a succession of homes until she remarried in 1804. In 1833, while visiting Lake Como in Italy, his lack of success at sketching the scenery prompted him to dream up a new machine with light-sensitive paper that would make the sketches for him automatically. Fox Talbot went on to develop the three primary elements of photography: printing, fixing, and developing. Although simply exposing photographic paper to the light produced an image, it required very very long exposure times. By accident, Talbot discovered that there was an image after a very short exposure. He could not see it, he found he could chemically develop it into a useful negative. The image on this negative was then fixed with a chemical solution. The solution of chemicals removed the light-sensitive silver and enabled the picture to be viewed in bright light. With the negative image, Fox Talbot realized he could repeat the process of printing from the negative. Consequently, his process could make any number of positive prints, unlike the Daguerreotypes. He called this the 'calotype' and patented the process in 1841.

GEORGE EASTMAN
George Eastman was born on July 12th, 1854 in the village of Waterville he was the youngest of three children. He was an American innovator and entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and popularized the use of roll film. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film in 1888 by the world's first film-makers Eadweard Muybridge and Louis Le Prince, and a few years later by their followers Léon Bouly, Thomas Edison, the Lumière Brothers, and Georges Méliès.
In 1884, Eastman patented the first film in roll form to prove practicable. In 1888, he perfected the Kodak camera, the first camera designed specifically for roll film. In 1892, he established the Eastman Kodak Company, in Rochester, New York. It was one of the first firms to mass-produce standardized photography equipment. The company also manufactured the flexible transparent film, devised by Eastman in 1889, which proved vital to the subsequent development of the motion picture industry.