The History of Photography.

Essay by bossman23University, Bachelor's October 2005

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Photography is a technological invention that has become the most universal means of communication and artistic expression that the world has known. It overcomes the differences of language. It can be specific and realistic, where music and related media can only be abstracted or general. In the form of motion pictures it can be used for television and the movies. As a form of visual art, it has as wide a range of unique expressive capabilities as painting, sketching and any other hand art. As a scientific tool, the precision in making visual records is beyond the capability of the human senses. The history of photography is a matter of technological growth and of simultaneous communicative growth (Encyclopedia of Practical

Photography 1339-1340).The world first at large learned how to make photographs in 1839. In that year the Daguerreotype and the Collotype, general ways to make pictures were introduced to the public.

Both were able to make pictures quickly, easily and with no skill or training. The inventor of the Daguerreotype was a French man named Louis Jacques Mande Dqguerre. The Daguerreotypes were literally mirror images. A silvered copper plate was buffed to bring a polish an then put over the tope of a box containing a few participles of iodine. The fumes from the iodine reacted with the silver on the plate to form silver iodine, a light-sensitive chemical. The plate was exposed in a camera for about twenty minutes. Then the plate was put over mercury and heated to 167 F. an image slowly appeared as a whitish amalgen formed on the surface of the plate in proportion to the amount of light it was exposed to. Those who saw the process for the first time thought it to be magic. An English scientist and scholar, William Henry Fox...