ancient times: camera obscuras used to form images on walls in darkened rooms; image formation via a pinhole
5th-4th centuries: Chinese and Greek philosophers describe the basic principles of optics and the camera
16th century: brightness and clarity of camera obscuras improved by enlarging the hole inserting a telescope lens
17th century: camera obscuras in frequent use by artists and made portable in the form of sedan chairs
1664-1666: Isaac Newton discovers that white light is composed of different colors
1727: Professor J. Schulze mixes chalk, nitric acid, and silver in a flask; notices darkening on side of flask exposed to sunlight. Accidental creation of the first photo-sensitive compound
1794: First Panorama opens, the forerunner of the movie house invented by Robert Barker
1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes "sun pictures" by placing opaque objects on leather treated with silver nitrate; resulting images deteriorated rapidly, however, if displayed under light stronger than from candles
1814: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce achieves first photographic image with camera obscura - however, the image required eight hours of light exposure and later faded
1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper
1827: Daguerre’s first daguerreotype - the first image that was fixed and did not fade and needed under thirty minutes of light exposure
1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in silver chloride and fixed with a salt solution. Talbot created positive images by contact printing onto another sheet of paper
1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury; Daguerre is awarded a state pension by the French government in exchange for publication of methods and the rights by other French citizens to use the Daguerreotype process
1839: Scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel invents the word 'Photography'. It comes from the Greek words: photos (light) and graphein (to draw)
1840: First American patent issued in photography to Alexander Wolcott for his camera
1841: William Henry Talbot patents the Calotype process - the first negative-positive process making possible the first multiple copies
1843: First advertisement with a photograph made in Philadelphia, USA
1851: Frederick Scott Archer, a sculptor in London, improves photographic resolution by spreading a mixture of collodion (nitrated cotton dissolved in ether and alcohol) and chemicals on sheets of glass. Wet plate collodion photography was much cheaper than daguerreotypes, the negative/positive process permitted unlimited reproductions, and the process was published but not patented. Images required only two or three seconds of light exposure
1853: Nada (Felix Toumachon) opens his portrait studio in Paris
1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade
1855: beginning of stereoscopic era
1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal (tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the US
1859: Panoramic camera patented - the Sutton
1861: Oliver Wendell Holmes invents stereoscope viewer
1861: Scottish physicist James Clerk-Maxwell demonstrates a color photography system involving three black and white photographs, each taken through a red, green, or blue filter. The photos were turned into lantern slides and projected in registration with the same color filters. This is the "color separation" method
1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives
1865: Photographs and photographic negatives are added to protected works under copyright
1868: Ducas de Hauron publishes a book proposing a variety of methods for color photography
1870: center of period in which the US Congress sent photographers out to the West. The most famous images were taken by William Jackson and Tim O'Sullivan
1871: Richard Leach Maddox, an English doctor, proposes the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the "dry plate" process - negatives no longer had to be developed immediately
1877: Edweard Muybridge, born in England as Edward Muggridge, settles "do a horse's four hooves ever leave the ground at once" bet among rich San Franciscans by time-sequenced photography of Leland Stanford's horse
1878: Dry plates being manufactured commercially
1880: George Eastman, age 24, sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic
1884: George Eastman invents flexible, paper-based photographic film
1888: first Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5-inch diameter circular pictures
1888: Eastman patents Kodak roll-film camera
1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper
1890: Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives, images of tenement life in New york City
1898: Reverend Hannibal Goodwin patents celluloid photographic film
1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced. First mass-marketed camera
1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in New York City
1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and therefore high quality color separation color photography
1907: first commercial color film, the Autochrome plates, manufactured by Lumiere brothers in France
1909: Lewis Hine hired by US National Child Labor Committee to photograph children working mjills
1913/1914: First 35mm still camera developed
1914: Oscar Barnack, employed by German microscope manufacturer Leitz, develops camera using the modern 24x36mm frame and sprocketed 35mm movie film
1917: Nippon Kogaku K.K., which will eventually become Nikon, established in Tokyo
1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("rayographs") by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb; Eugegrave;ne Atget, aged 64, assigned to photograph the brothels of Paris
1924: Leitz markets a derivative of Barnack's camera commercially as the "Leica", the first high quality 35mm camera
1925: André Kertész moves from his native Hungary to Paris, where he begins an 11-year project photographing street life
1927: General Electric invents the modern flash bulb
1928: Albert Renger-Patzsch publishes The World is Beautiful, close-ups emphasizing the form of natural and man-made objects; Rollei introduces the Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex producing a 6x6 cm image on roll film
1931: development of strobe photography by Harold ("Doc") Edgerton at MIT
1932: First light meter with photoelectric cell introduced
1932: inception of Technicolor for movies, where three black and white negatives were made in the same camera under different filters; Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston, et al, form Group f/64 dedicated to "straight photographic thought and production".; Henri Cartier-Bresson buys a Leica and begins a 60-year career photographing people; On March 14, George Eastman, aged 77, writes suicide note--"My work is done. Why wait?"--and shoots himself
1933: Brassaï publishes Paris de nuit
1934: Fuji Photo Film founded. By 1938, Fuji is making cameras and lenses in addition to film
1935: Farm Security Administration hires Roy Stryker to run a historical section. Stryker would hire Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, et al. to photograph rural hardships over the next six years
1936: development of Kodachrome, the first color multi-layered color film; development of Exakta, pioneering 35mm single-lens reflex (SLR) camera
World War II: 1) development of multi-layer color negative films 2) Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Carl Mydans, and W. Eugene Smith cover the war for LIFE magazine
1941: Eastman Kodak introduces Kodacolor negative film
1942: Chester Carlson receives patent for electric photography (xerography)
1947: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour start the photographer-owned Magnum picture agency
1948: Edwin Land markets the Polaroid camera
1948: Hasselblad in Sweden offers its first medium-format SLR for commercial sale; Pentax in Japan introduces the automatic diaphragm
1949: East German Zeiss develops the Contax S, first SLR with a non-reversed image in a pentaprism viewfinder
1954: Eastman Kodak introduces high speed Tri-X film
1954: Asahiflex II, world's first SLR with an instant return mirror
1955: Edward Steichen curates Family of Man exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art
1957: Asahi Pentax, world's SLR with a penta prism thus allowing eye-level viewing with correct perspective
1959: Nikon F introduced
1960: world's first automatic diaphragm
1960: Garry Winogrand begins photographing women on the streets of New York City
1960: EG&G develops extreme depth underwater camera for U.S. Navy
1963: first color instant film developed by Polaroid; Instamatic released by Kodak; first purpose-built underwater introduced, the Nikonos
1964: TTL metering, the Spotmatic is the world's first SLR with ttl metering
1968: Photograph of the Earth from the moon
1971: SMC coating for lenses, the world's first effective lens coating system
1972: 110-format cameras introduced by Kodak with a 13x17mm frame
1973: C-41 color negative process introduced, replacing C-22
1973: Polaroid introduces one-step instant photography with the SX-70 camera
1975: Nicholas Nixon takes his first annual photograph of his wife and her sisters: "The Brown Sisters"
1977: George Eastman and Edwin Land inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame
1977: Cindy Sherman begins work on Untitled Film Stills, completed in 1980
1978: Konica introduces first point-and-shoot, autofocus camera
1980: Elsa Dorfman begins making portraits with the 20x24" Polaroid
1980: ME-F, the world's first 35 mm SLR Auto Focus camera
1982: Sony demonstrates Mavica "still video" camera
1983: Kodak introduces disk camera, using an 8x11mm frame (the same as in the Minox spy camera)
1984: Canon demonstrates first digital electronic still camera
1985: Pixar introduces digital imaging processor
1985: Minolta markets the world's first autofocus SLR system (called "Maxxum" in the US)
1986: world's first 35 mm compact with a built in zoom lens
1990: Eastman Kodak announces Photo CD as a digital image storage medium
1992: Kodak introduces PhotoCD
1997: Rob Silvers publishes Photomosaics
1997: 645N, the world's first autofocus medium format SLR
2004: Canon releases the EOS 1Ds Mark II, the first digital camera to beat 35mm film on quality tests