There was no single inventor
The camera was not invented on a particular day by a particular person. It was assembled over many centuries from separate pieces: an optical effect that people noticed in antiquity, lenses that improved the image, and chemistry that eventually made the image permanent. Later, film, electronics and software changed what a camera is made of without changing its basic job, which is to gather light from a scene and record it.
This page is a timeline. Each stage has its own detailed article on this site, so the aim here is to show how the pieces fit together and to flag where the “firsts” are disputed.
Light through a small hole
When light from a bright scene passes through a small opening into a dark space, it forms an upside-down, mirror-reversed picture of that scene on the opposite surface. Nothing in this effect needs a lens. Early observers noticed it in shadows under leafy trees, where gaps between leaves cast many small images of the sun, including crescents during an eclipse.
Chinese writings associated with the philosopher Mozi, from around the fifth century BCE, are often cited as an early description of the inverted image. Greek writers discussed the eclipse effect, and the Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham, writing in the early eleventh century, studied it more systematically as part of his work on optics. The Chinese scientist Shen Kuo also commented on it in the eleventh century. These accounts differ in detail, and it is fair to say that several cultures understood the effect independently.
The camera obscura becomes a tool
The Latin phrase camera obscura, meaning dark chamber, was used by Johannes Kepler in the early 1600s, but the device was in use well before that. Descriptions appear in European notebooks around 1500, including those of Leonardo da Vinci. In the sixteenth century a lens was added to the opening, which made the image far brighter and sharper than a bare pinhole could. Lens-making was improving at the time alongside the telescope and the compound microscope, and the camera obscura benefited from it.
For the next two centuries it served as a drawing aid, an astronomical instrument for watching the sun safely, and eventually a portable box with a mirror that turned the image right side up on a ground-glass screen. What it could not do was keep the picture. A person had to trace it by hand.
Making the image last
The missing ingredient was a material that changed when exposed to light and could then be made stable. Experimenters had known since the early 1700s that silver salts darken in light. Around 1800, Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy made silhouettes and copies on treated paper and leather, but they could not stop the pictures from darkening further in daylight.
The earliest surviving photograph made in a camera is usually credited to the French inventor Nicephore Niepce, around 1826 or 1827, a view from an upstairs window recorded on a pewter plate coated with a light-sensitive bitumen. The exposure was very long, and sources disagree on exactly how long. Niepce later worked with Louis Daguerre, who developed a sharper and much faster process on polished silver-coated copper plates. The French government announced the daguerreotype publicly in 1839 and made the method freely available in most of the world, which helped it spread quickly.
In the same year in England, William Henry Fox Talbot announced a paper-based method. His later calotype process produced a negative from which many positive prints could be made, a principle that dominated photography for the next 150 years. Much as movable type multiplied text, the negative multiplied images.
Glass, gelatin and roll film
From the 1850s, photographers coated glass plates with a sticky collodion solution, which gave detailed negatives but had to be exposed and developed while still wet. In the 1870s, factory-made gelatin dry plates, associated with Richard Leach Maddox’s early work and later improved by others, allowed plates to be bought ready to use and exposed in a fraction of a second.
George Eastman then turned photography into something an amateur could do without a darkroom. His Kodak camera of 1888 came loaded with a roll of film and was returned to the company for developing. The Brownie, introduced in 1900, was aimed at children and families. By the early twentieth century, thirty-five millimeter cinema film was being adapted for still cameras, and the Leica, sold from the mid-1920s, made the small, quick, pocketable format popular. Color film and instant film, such as the system Edwin Land introduced in the late 1940s, added further options, though they changed the process more than the idea.
From film to sensors
Electronic imaging grew out of television and space research. In the late 1960s, the charge-coupled device was developed at Bell Labs as a way to move electrical charge across a chip, and it soon turned out to be a good light sensor. In 1975, Steven Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, built an experimental camera around such a sensor that recorded black-and-white images to cassette tape. It is often credited as the first digital camera, though that label depends on how “camera” and “digital” are defined.
Consumer digital cameras appeared in the 1990s and quickly improved as silicon chips got cheaper and memory cards grew larger. Sales of film cameras fell sharply during the 2000s.
The camera joins the phone
Putting a small camera inside a mobile phone began around the turn of the millennium, first in Japan and South Korea. As cellular networks improved and screens grew sharper, the phone became the camera most people actually carry. Modern smartphones also use software to combine several exposures into a single picture, a step well beyond what either film or the first digital cameras attempted.
Quick timeline
| Period | Development |
|---|---|
| Fifth century BCE onward | Pinhole images described in Chinese and Greek writings |
| Early 11th century | Ibn al-Haytham studies the dark-room image |
| 1500s | Lens added; camera obscura used for drawing |
| c. 1826-1827 | Niepce records a lasting image in a camera |
| 1839 | Daguerreotype announced; Talbot announces a paper process |
| 1850s | Wet collodion glass plates |
| 1870s | Gelatin dry plates |
| 1888 | Kodak camera with roll film |
| Mid-1920s | Leica brings 35mm film to still photography |
| Late 1940s | Instant film from Polaroid |
| 1975 | Kodak engineer builds an experimental digital camera |
| 1990s | Consumer digital cameras |
| Around 2000 | First camera phones sold |
What is well documented and what is not
The dates of the daguerreotype announcement, the Kodak camera and the 1975 prototype are well documented. The exact date and exposure time of Niepce’s surviving photograph, the credit for the first camera obscura, and the “first” digital or phone camera all depend on definitions and are still discussed by historians. Treat any single name attached to “the inventor of the camera” with caution.