1816: Nicéphore Niépce combines the camera obscura with photosensitive paper.
1826: Niépce creates a permanent image.
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.
1839 – ca. 1860: Daguerreotype
1841: Talbot patents his process under the name “calotype”.
1850 – ca. 1890: Albumen Prints
1851: Frederick Scott Archer 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.
1851 – 1880s: Ambrotype: the “glass Daguerreotype”
1854: Adolphe Disderi develops carte-de-visite photography in Paris, leading to worldwide boom in portrait studios for the next decade.
1855-57: Direct positive images on glass (ambrotypes) and metal (tintypes or ferrotypes) popular in the U.S.
1871: Richard Leach Maddox proposes the use of an emulsion of gelatin and silver bromide on a glass plate, the “dry plate” process.
1878: Dry plates being manufactured commercially.
1880: George Eastman sets up Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, New York. First half-tone photograph appears in a daily newspaper, the New York Graphic.
1888: First Kodak camera, containing a 20-foot roll of paper, enough for 100 2.5inch diameter circular pictures.
1889: Improved Kodak camera with roll of film instead of paper.
1906: Availability of panchromatic black and white film and therefore high quality color separation color photography.
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