Early developments in photography

Since prehistoric times man has tried to capture the world around him in the form of images. Cave paintings bear testimony to this where the artists depicted the likeness to animals around them by sketching or painting them then the Greek philosopher Aristotle who observed that the light passing through a small hole in the wall of a room formed an upside-down image of an object.

[...] Daguerreotype method Louis Daguerre (1789-1851) used silvered copper plates coated with vapors of iodine, which were produced over heated mercury. By 1837 he had produced many photographs by this daguerreotype method. This method was launched in 1839 with substantial publicity and fanfare that overshadowed all the earlier systems. And at the same time William Henry Fox Talbot (180077) was continuing hi research on photography in Britain. Called, photogenic drawing, his process produced contact prints of leaves and manuscripts. In 1840 Talbot devised the collotype, recognized as the original form of the negative-positive system of photography in use today. [...]

[...] The disadvantage of this system was that the plate had to be loaded, exposed and developed while it was still wet, which severely limited its practical uses. In 1879 a dry system was being commercially manufactured in England, Germany and the United States. This adopted the suggestion by an English physician, Richard L. Maddox (1816-1902), of an emulsion using gelatin in place of collection. In the United States, George Eastman (1854-1932) manufactured silver bromide printing paper as early as 1884. In 1888 he introduced a film with emulsion coated on celluloid. At that time cameras were sold loaded with 100 exposure films. [...]