History Made With Cameras

Now a days there are cameras everywhere. In the streets, banks, in the coffee shop and grocery store to the gas stations and malls. If you're in public you can bet you're somehow, someway being recorded. Most are there to deter criminal activity or to keep an eye on things, just in case. When things that will go down in history happen and are so well recorded and preserved, they are fortunate to have. Most people have a cell phone and on that cell phone they have a camera. This just makes things so much more simple to preserve. But what about the first few?


The idea of a camera goes back to ancient China and Greece with the invention of the camera obscura, a device used to project an upside down image through a pinhole or lens unto a viewing surface. The only way to preserve that image was to manually trace it, enter Nicéphore Niépce.

 Niépce was the one to take the first ever known picture in the early 1800's. He developed a method for capturing an image on a piece of paper covered in silver chloride. But alas, the pictures he took with his camera were not permanent. Every time he would expose the pictures to light they would darken becoming imperceptible. Thus, years later he used a camera developed by opticians Charles and Vincent Chavalier to take pictures on surfaces with Bitumen of Judea thinly coated on. And from that experiment we have the worlds earliest surviving photograph.

"View from the Window at Le Gras"

Not the pretties picture ever, but one with a lot of historical value.  I should also mention that the picture above is the manually enhanced version. The actual picture looks like this:

Photo by J. Paul Getty Museum

 Even less pretty. But this combines two of my favorite subjects history and photography. Thought I would share this bit of interesting information with my readers. Seeing as it's "Throwback Thursday" I though this fit the bill nicely. And make sure to check out my upcoming travel section on here next week!