National Camera Day

First daguerreotype camera

June 29th is National Camera Day. The first permanent photograph from a camera came in 1825 from Joseph Nicephore Niepce. He used a sliding wooden box developed by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris. In the 1830s, William Henry Fox Talbert in England also worked on photographic techniques. The first photographic camera developed for commercial production came in 1839 when Alphonse Giroux produced a daguerreotype camera. Many others also worked on improvements to photography around this time. By the time of the American Civil War, the camera had progressed enough to give us good images of the soldiers and the war.

Box camera (CC BY-SA 3.0, httpscommons.wikimedia.
orgwindex.phpcurid=222433)   

Another great advance in photography came in 1885 when George Eastman started manufacturing a paper film for cameras. He switched to celluloid film in 1889. His first "Kodak" box camera came out in 1888. Over the next years, the camera had many improvements with single-lens reflex cameras being a big one. Instant photography, developed by Polaroid in 1948, came into vogue for a while.

We have come a long way in photography. Today, we not only have digital cameras, but our cell phones are also capable of taking photos. According to Business Insider, over 1.2 trillion digital photos were taken in 2017. We can but wonder what will happen to cameras and photography in the future.

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