What film changed
For its first half-century, photography needed a darkroom and a good deal of chemical skill. Large-scale industrial chemistry changed that, because film could be coated by the mile in factories. Film cameras are the long middle chapter of the story, running from the late 1880s to the 2000s, in which the chemistry was packaged into a product that anyone could buy, load, shoot and send away for processing. That change in who could take photographs is more important than any single mechanical improvement.
Roll film arrives
George Eastman, a bank clerk turned photographic entrepreneur in Rochester, New York, developed dry plates and then flexible film. His Kodak camera of 1888 was a simple box that came loaded with enough film for a hundred exposures, according to commonly cited accounts. When it was used up, the whole camera went back to the company, which developed the film, made prints and returned the camera reloaded. The slogan “You press the button, we do the rest” captured the point. In 1889 a transparent celluloid film base made a roll film that could be loaded by the user in daylight, and a later design, the Brownie of 1900, sold for a dollar and aimed at children.
The priority of the celluloid film is contested. Hannibal Goodwin, a clergyman in New Jersey, applied for a patent on a similar film in 1887, and it was granted in 1898. After his death, his estate pursued the claim, and Eastman Kodak eventually paid to settle it. Historians still discuss how much credit each side deserves.
The snapshot and the hobbyist
Cheap cameras created the “snapshot,” a word that had originally meant a hurried gunshot and was applied to photography in the nineteenth century. Families began photographing birthdays, holidays and travel, building the albums that now serve as a major source for social history. Companies such as Kodak also marketed film, processing and printing as a single recurring business, a model that shaped the industry for a century.
Small cameras and 35mm
The 35mm format was borrowed from cinema. Oskar Barnack, an engineer at the Leitz company in Germany, built prototype cameras that used motion-picture film around 1913 and 1914, and the Leica was put on sale in the mid-1920s. Its small size and fast lens suited photojournalists and street photographers. Competitors, including the German Contax, followed, and later the Japanese manufacturers helped to establish 35mm as the dominant professional and enthusiast format.
The 35mm frame measures about 36 by 24 millimeters. That size later became the reference point for “full-frame” digital sensors.
Color film and simpler loading
Kodachrome, a color transparency film introduced in 1935, and later color negative films made color photography accessible. Developing and printing of color films at local labs expanded in the postwar years. For ordinary users, the next hurdle was the awkward business of threading film. Kodak’s Instamatic cameras, launched in 1963, used drop-in cartridges that removed the problem. A smaller cartridge format arrived in 1972, and the Advanced Photo System followed in 1996, but neither displaced 35mm for long.
Automation
From the 1960s on, cameras added light meters coupled to the lens, then automatic exposure, increasingly handled by integrated circuits inside the body. Camera bodies themselves were often molded from bakelite plastic and, later, other plastics, which kept costs low. In the late 1970s the first widely sold autofocus compact cameras appeared, followed by built-in motorized film advance and a flash that fired automatically. These “point-and-shoot” models reduced the number of decisions a photographer had to make. Single-lens reflex cameras, in which the photographer looks through the lens itself, became the choice of serious amateurs.
Single-use cameras
In the mid-1980s, the Japanese company Fujifilm and then Kodak sold pre-loaded, one-time-use cameras, intended for weddings, holidays and beaches. They were popular for a time and are an example of how far the camera had been simplified.
The end of the film era
Sales of film cameras fell steeply in the early 2000s as digital models improved, and the arrival of cameras in smartphones accelerated the decline. Many film manufacturers wound down or restructured, and Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012. Film did not disappear, though; a smaller market of enthusiasts and artists continues to use it, and some manufacturers still produce it.
A note on the sources
Details such as the number of exposures on the original Kodak or the exact prototype date of the Leica come from commonly cited accounts, and some vary slightly between sources. The broad pattern is well established: a century of steady simplification, with film as the medium that linked the daguerreotype era to the digital one.