Original photo by Suwan Wanawattanawong/ Shutterstock
Imagine a world without cameras — it’s almost impossible. Film, television, history, news, and even our memories are influenced by a technology that has been around for less than two centuries. Here are 10 facts that explore the amazing history of photography, and how it grew from a quirky laboratory experiment to redefining the human experience.
The Story of Photography Begins a Century Before the First Photo
“View from the Window at Le Gras,” taken in 1826 or 1827 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, is widely considered the oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera — but that’s not the beginning of the story of photography. To understand the technology’s origin story, you need to go back about a century and explore the work of German scientist and polymath Johann Heinrich Schulze. Although medieval alchemists often experimented with silver chloride, and even Leonardo da Vinci conceptualized the camera obscura, Schulze (who was actually an anatomist) conducted the first serious experiments in 1717 that established how light reacted to silver salts — the very basis of what would become photography. Schulze’s rudimentary images eventually faded to black because no method existed to prevent overexposure, but the experiments astounded those who saw them, with Schulze eventually writing, “… many who were curious about the experiment but ignorant of its nature took occasion to attribute the thing to some sort of trick.” But it was no trick — only science that had yet to be fully understood.
We Don’t Know the Names of the First People Ever Photographed
One day in 1838, Louis Daguerre — physicist, photography pioneer, and inventor of the daguerreotype (the earliest form of practical photography) — stood in a window overlooking Paris’ Boulevard du Temple and snapped a photograph. Since this was one of the first photographs ever taken, the image was actually less of a “snap” and more of a slog, as the process required around 10 minutes to gather enough light to produce an image on a highly polished silver-plated copper sheet. Because of this long exposure time, Daguerre’s photo captured what appeared to be an empty street, as the hustle and bustle of passing traffic didn’t stay long enough to show up in the photo. In fact, the only thing in the image except for immobile trees, sky, and concrete is a lone shadowy figure getting his boots shined, which explains why he stood still long enough to be fixed in the photo. Upon closer inspection, viewers can just barely make out the shoeshiner hard at work. Today, of course, no one knows the name of that man getting a shoeshine, or the person giving it.
The First True Digital Camera Was Invented to Photograph the Aurora Borealis
The advent of the digital camera was made possible by the invention of a little-known piece of technology called a charged-couple device (CCD) in 1969. At its most basic, a CCD is a light sensor that sits behind a camera lens and effectively replaces the need for film. Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first digital camera prototype in 1975, but his creation was unwieldy, requiring 16 batteries and a special screen just to view the images. The first “true” digital camera came two years later, when the University of Calgary Canada ASI Science Team created the Fairchild All-Sky imager for snapping photos of the aurora borealis. A little more than a decade later, the technology came to consumers when Fujifilm released the FUJIX DS-1P in 1988.
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The World’s Largest Digital Camera Weighs 3 Tons
The world’s first digital camera scanned the night sky, and the same can be said for the largest digital camera ever made. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera lies at the heart of a new telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the Chilean mountains, but this isn’t your average DSLR. The LSST camera weighs 3 tons, contains a 3200 megapixel sensor (by comparison, an iPhone camera has only 48 megapixels), and its lens stretches a full 5 feet across. Once installed at the end of 2024, the camera will capture 15 terabytes every single night over the course of 10 years and will observe an estimated 20 billion galaxies. It’s a big camera for an equally big job.
The Left Side of Your Face Likely Looks Better in Photos
Want to capture your “good” side in your next photo? Show off that left cheek. According to a 2012 study from Wake Forest University, the left side of a person’s face often expresses more emotion than the right, and onlookers tend to find that more aesthetically pleasing. When people were asked to rate the pleasantness of male and female profiles presenting both a left and right cheek, the participants overwhelmingly chose the left as more pleasant. One theory for this left-faced bias is that emotion and spatial awareness is largely dominated by the right hemisphere of our brain but is lateralized to the left side of our body, so emotions are expressed more intensely on the left side of our face. Interestingly, Western artists throughout the centuries have had a bias for painting portraits with subjects displaying their left cheek, especially women, with “Mona Lisa” being a prime example.
In 1995 a 1 Megapixel Camera Cost $20,000
Every new technology comes with an early adopter tax. The price of the first Macintosh in 1984 comes out to about $6,000 in today’s dollars, and the first cellphone, the Motorola Dynatac 8000x, would cost around $12,000 today (with only 30 minutes of battery life). But those costs pale in comparison to the first 1MP pro camera. Released in 1995, this Fuji X/Nikon hybrid camera had a 1.3 megapixel sensor and a 131 MB removable memory card (capable of storing 70 photos), all for the eye-popping price of $20,000, which is around $38,000 today. Only 12 years later, Apple — which also made the impressive QuickTake camera in the mid-’90s — introduced a 2 megapixel camera on its original iPhone for a fraction of the cost. Today, professional photographers use cameras with 24 megapixels (or more).
The First Color Photograph Was Taken During the U.S. Civil War
Color photography is usually associated with the 20th century, but its origins date back to the early 1860s. On May 17, 1861, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who later that very same year began publishing his world-changing electromagnetic equations, revealed the first color photograph to the Royal Institution of Great Britain. The photo showed the multiple hues of a tartan ribbon, and Maxwell created the image by having the same ribbon photographed three times using red, yellow, and blue filters and then combining them (known today as additive color theory). Maxwell first suggested this three-color method back in 1855, but it wasn’t until his collaboration with Thomas Sutton (inventor of the single-lens reflex camera), who actually snapped the images, that Maxwell’s vision finally came to life. Because the photographic plates were far less sensitive to red and green, the color wasn’t perfectly true to life, but it’s still considered the first color photo nonetheless.
The Most-Viewed Photograph in History Is Probably the Windows XP Wallpaper
The most-viewed photo isn’t from the lens of legendary photographers like Ansel Adams or Jacob Riis, but a simple picture of a field in Sonoma, California — and chances are you’ve seen it, too. The photograph, originally captured by photographer Charles O’Rear and named “Bliss,” was taken in 1996. Four years later, Microsoft paid O’Rear an undisclosed (but north of $100,000) amount of money to use the image as the default desktop wallpaper for Windows XP in 2002. O’Rear says the image was so valuable that FedEx refused shipment, so he hand-delivered the photograph to Microsoft’s offices near Seattle, Washington. The brilliantly bright green rolling hill (which is now a vineyard) accompanied by a picturesque bright blue sky has likely been seen by billions of people around the world due to the software’s global ubiquity.
The Red-Eye Effect Is Caused by Blood Vessels
Sometimes when you take a photo using flash, something strange happens — the image comes back with subjects sporting demonlike red eyes. What’s going on here? Well, it all has to do with the human iris. At the back of the eye are red blood vessels embedded in the choroid (a layer of tissue that nourishes the retina) that are vital to the function of the eye’s photosensitive cells and nerves. When a camera uses a flash, it’s usually to light a dim area, and in such environments, the human pupil is naturally dilated to let in more light. The pupil doesn’t have enough time to contract, so the flash illuminates the blood vessels in the back of the eye, which is then captured on the camera’s sensor. Many modern cameras now include a dual-flash system where the first flash contracts the pupil and the second flash lights the scene for the actual photo, thus eliminating that pesky red-eye effect.
We Probably Take More Photos Every Minute Than Were Taken in the Entire 19th Century
Two centuries ago, imaging pioneers were only beginning to tinker with ways to capture the world around them using chemicals and light, and now cameras are embedded in our daily lives. We don’t know how many photos were taken in the 19th century, but it’s likely it was a few million at most. In 2014, it was estimated that humanity took a staggering 1 trillion photos that year, which means that every two minutes of 2014, we likely took more photos than were taken in the entire 19th century. Experts believe that the number of cameras in the world passed 45 billion in 2022 (that’s more than five cameras for every person). As cameras continue to get better while shrinking (sometimes to the size of a grain of sand), that number is only increasing, with estimates suggesting humans will take 2 trillion photos in 2025. When that happens, every single minute of the day will create more photos than an entire century of human history.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste among others.
