Invention Of The Camera

The Birth of Photographs, Moving Pictures and Television

Late in 1962, American aircraft, flying at heights so great they were invisible from the earth, took photographs of Cuba. To the human eye, from this height, there would be no detail, only the flat brown silhouette of an island against the sea, the gaps, the bulges, of its coastline.

But a few minutes later, when these photographs were developed, they proved beyond all doubt the existence of what, till now, had been only an ugly rumour. Item by item, hour by hour, the Soviet Union had been building a network of rocket bases aimed at the heart of America. Some were complete, a few were still being built. All were sited to fire north-west, into the centre of the continent, and all of them were within a few hundred miles of their target.

The crisis that followed, the way in which it was resolved, all this is history. But if the most startling advances had not been made in the science of photography during the century and a quarter since it began, the bases would never have been detected, with consequences at which we can only guess.

How can a camera reveal so much more than is apparent to the eye? It has two main advantages. Firstly, the camera, seeing through a powerful, long-range lens (though our eyes could see almost as well, aided by such a lens), has its built-in memory. Our eyes, looking earthward through a powerful lens from eighty thousand feet, may see a rocket installation, but the impression has gone in an instant, the light changes, the aircraft flies on. With its image preserved on film, the installation can be studied at leisure, compared with a hundred other pictures, earlier ones, pictures taken at different times of day, from different angles. They can be magnified again, under a glass.

A second advantage possessed by the camera is that it can use film and filters designed to secure an image by the action, not of ordinary light rays, affected as they are by haze and cloud, but of infra-red rays, present in sunlight and invisible to the human eye. Unaffected by cloud, the infra-red rays yield a picture in conditions where visibility hardly exists.

This is what we do now. How did it start? How far have we come?

Photography is generally reckoned to have begun with Daguerre in 1839; he was the first man to make it practicable as well as possible. From the announcement, in August of that year, of his success, his “daguerrotype” was supreme for twelve years. This was photography, and the world flocked to Monsieur Daguerre’s studio.

But the world’s first photo had been taken thirteen years before, by Daguerre’s compatriot, Niepce. It is a view from his window and, though it is blurred and faint, we can clearly make out a tree, a courtyard, a pigeon-roost. The principle by which it was taken, by which photos are still taken, that sunlight turns certain salts of silver black, had been noticed centuries before. Whether it was the heat or the light that did it, no one knew, but it happened. No one considered a possible application of the phenomenon. Then in 1727, in Germany, Johann Schulze proved that the effect was caused by light. He succeeded in transferring the outline of stencilled letters, in sunlight, on to a white mixture of chalk grains and nitrate of silver, rather like a birthday message on a cake. The grains went dark where the light reached, stayed white where it did not. In front of a fire, nothing happened; heat could have nothing to do with it.

There was no way of retaining Schulze’s impression. As soon as it was studied under ordinary light, all the grains went black.
Nothing further was done for a hundred years. Then Niepce discovered, while he experimented with new methods of printing, that an image cast by a “camera obscura” (literally a “dark room”, often an attic room, with a lens in its roof which could throw a startling image of the outside scene on to a white cloth) would leave an impression on a metal plate covered with a special bitumen. The bitumen bleached easily in strong light and Niepce discovered the more important fact that it hardened as well. The soft bits, which had been less exposed to light, he could wash off, leaving a rough image. He made several copies of etchings, oiling them so they were transparent and placing them, in strong sunlight, over his coated plate. Then he made his first picture from nature, using the camera obscura. The exposure lasted eight hours (we can see the sun on both sides of the sky) but the picture was recognizable.

Meanwhile, Louis Daguerre was working on similar lines and in 1829 when he heard of Niepce’s discovery he invited him to join him. It was not for eight years, by which time Niepce had died, that their collaboration bore fruit in the form of a first “daguerrotype”. It required only twenty minutes, as against eight hours, and gave a much more detailed picture. Daguerre had been an artist and this first daguerrotype is an attractive, well-composed still life, a seashell, two cupids’ heads, a painting, a wine flask. Two years later he made his first picture of a living subject and published the details. He had reverted from Niepce’s bitumen to salts of silver and had discovered that a very short exposure which had no noticeable effect on the photographic plate could be miraculously “developed” so that the picture was clear. He also found a chemical means of “fixing” the image, so that further exposure to light did not darken the whole of the plate.

From this date photography began, and Daguerre, perhaps not quite justly, has the credit. We do not know how much work was done by Niepce, but do know that in England, Fox Talbot had been working on a different process and had made a clear picture of his workshop window, but not of what was visible through it, as early as 1835, and on paper.

As Talbot’s method improved and his “Talbotypes” became popular, his pictures began to supplant Daguerre’s. For one thing the picture, on paper, was cheaper to produce than one on a metal plate, and copies could be made of it, on to other pieces of paper, whereas a daguerrotype was the only one of its kind, a singleton; the “positive” image, black being black and white being white, was formed in the camera, and the metal plate after removal, developing and fixing, was the picture.

With Talbot’s method, the ancestor of the one we use today, a “negative” was formed in the camera, black was white; white was black, and from this an infinite number of positives (in effect, photographs of that negative) could be easily, cheaply, made.

Photography, like so many others, is a compound discovery. The Science Museum in London lists the Fathers of Photography as “Niepce, Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Sir John Herschel, J. B. Reade, F. Scott Archer, R. L. Maddox,” and each of these played a part. A name not listed, but whose owner made a discovery which put photography among the amateurs, and thus enormously multiplied the brains, the hands working on its development, was the American, George Eastman (of “Kodak” fame), who in 1884 put on the market the first roll-film. This was usable by any novice, though it still had to be loaded into the camera in complete darkness. Seven years later he followed up with a “daylight-loading” film, and from now on photography was a household word, every family’s plaything.

The camera, both its name and its design are taken from the “camera obscura” which gave such innocent amusement to our ancestors, is simply a light-tight box with a lens at one end, a place for film at the other and a shutter in between. For simple photography, even the lens is unnecessary; a child can make a workable “pin-hole camera” by punching a tiny hole where more sophisticated equipment would demand a lens.

For anything beyond a toy lenses are required, and these apparently simple pieces of glass are the most expensive items in photography. A simple lens, one piece of glass, has many faults, varying from chromatic aberration in which the various colours of the spectrum are brought into focus at different distances, resulting in a blur, to astigmatism, which makes it impossible to focus at the same time both vertical and horizontal lines. Most faults can be rectified by using more than one lens or by making lenses of more than one glass (sometimes with as many as eight elements) and by careful “stopping down” of the lens so that light passes only through its centre.

Modern films, requiring exposure to light (a ten-thousandth of a second is quite feasible; Niepce used eight hours), have revolutionized photography. Rapidly moving objects (some, like rifle-bullets, moving too fast to be seen by eye) can be easily photographed. But with these rapid films we find we need, even in simple amateur photography, an “exposure-meter” and some sort of “range-finder”. To get a picture worthy of one’s film and one’s camera requires nowadays an accurate assessment of exposure, dependent on the light available, speed of film, size of lens, and an equally accurate measurement of the distance between lens and subject, in order that it be exactly “in focus”, and not blurred. With many modern cameras, these items, exposure-meter, range-finder, are built in, requiring no effort or thought on the part of the photographer; exposure, focus, set themselves, automatically.

Not long after the introduction of black-and-white photography, men began to experiment with colour. Although the process is more complicated, taking in effect three separate but simultaneous pictures with the three primary colours, red, blue and green, then combining them in one, it has reached a stage very near perfection, in still, as well as cine, photography.

The cinema is an art and a science of its own, but it deserves a mention here. Within a few years of the first still photograph, at least one experimenter had considered what the effect might be if a series of rapid photographs were taken of, say, a horse galloping, and then flicked past the eye, like a pack of cards, to simulate the horse’s movement. It worked, and for the first time men realized that a horse did not gallop with all four legs outstretched. There is all the difference in the world between old etchings of horses on the move and more recent ones; the artist has seen the same thing, has interpreted it differently.

From the pack of photo cards it was a fairly short step to making a machine which would project the pictures, one after the other, on to a screen, sufficiently rapidly to give the impression of movement, and to make a complementary camera, which would take pictures at the same rate. When this had been satisfactorily performed, the next step was to take the pictures very rapidly and project them slowly. The result was “slow motion”, which rapidly progressed from being a parlour joke to an essential tool of scientific research; the behaviour of a jet of liquid, the speed of a bullet, could be checked. And by reversing the process, taking pictures, say, every hour and projecting them far faster, we can see a flower bloom before our eyes.

The standard size of cine film for professional purposes is thirty-five millimetres across, and the principal developments in still photography have tended to exploit this useful size. A 35-mm. camera can be small and yet hold a huge number of potential exposures. With developments in enlargement from a small negative, it is no longer necessary to make prints of the same size as the negative and for most work a 35-mm. negative, which can be “blown up” to any size, gives an entirely satisfactory result.

No doubt Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Niepce or any of the early pioneers would be startled to see where their toy has led. Not only do automatically operated cameras in aircraft and satellites take vertical or oblique pictures at predetermined intervals, to spy from the air, X-ray cameras take pictures through solids, infra-red cameras take pictures in the dark, cine cameras take pictures that move. And, though, it is a distant cousin, but very definitely a blood relation, the television camera takes pictures and sends them, instantaneously, halfway round the world, bouncing them off satellites, pumping them along cables, getting the picture wherever it is needed or wanted, in less time than it would have taken Daguerre to open the shutter of his camera.

Where do we go from here?