The 12 Biggest Breakthroughs in Photo Technology

The 12 Biggest Breakthroughs in Photo Technology — page 3
2 The First Photograph Is a View Out a Window In the 1720s German scientist Johann Heinrich Schulze did an important experiment He proved that a chemical compound was photosensitive When silver nitrate was exposed to sunlight it turned dark In the late 1700s British chemist Thomas Wedgwood made one of the first tries to take a photograph He placed paper covered in silver nitrate in a camera obscura All he got was a shadowy image shined through the lighter areas of the drawing and hardened some of the bitumen Niépce washed away the rest of the bitumen A negative of the drawing was left on the plate Niépce tried a similar process with a camera obscura He aimed the camera out a window of his home in France After eight hours of exposure he took the metal plate out of the camera He washed away the bitumen In the early 1800s French inventor Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce developed a new printing method He called it heliography or sun drawing Niépce put bitumen a tar-like substance on a metal plate Then he placed a drawing over the bitumen and set it in the sun Sunlight Niépce A 19th century portrait of Joseph-Nicéphore 6