For centuries, humankind had recorded images of reality with pen and brush. Ancient peoples had drawn pictures of the animals they hunted. In China and in Renaissance Europe, the painter's art became "fine" art as the artist captured not only perfect likenesses but a sense of drama and motion.
In the meantime, many people shared the dream of being able to preserve an image directly and immediately by mechanical means. The realization of this dream would be more than a scientific achievement, it would mark a turning point in the way we perceive our own as well as others' environment.
The dream had its roots in the principle of the camera obscura in which sunlight, reflected from an object and directed through a small hole into a dark room or box, will project an inverted image of the object onto the opposite wall. In 1717, German doctor T.H. Schulze discovered that silver chloride was darkened by light, and in 1824, Joseph Nicephore Niepce (ney-ops) (1765-1833) discovered that a sun-printed image could be permanently fixed by coating a metal plate with bitumen before placing it in a camera obscura for a prolonged exposure. The resulting picture was called a heliotype. In 1829, Niepce entered into a partnership with Louis-Jacques Daguerre (do-gar) (1789-1851) to perfect this method. In 1839, Daguerre unveiled the daguerreotype process. In 1879, George Eastman (1854-1932) of Rochester, New York, invented an emulsion coating machine that allowed him to manufacture photographic plates in quantity. In 1889, Eastman began marketing strips of celluloid with emulsion on them that could be used to make a series of photographic negatives. This idea of a "roll of film" cranked through a camera is still the basis of nearly all popular photography and eventually paved the way for motion pictures.
While Eastman's development made motion pictures possible, the underlying phenomenon, known as the persistence of vision, was understood by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) as early as the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth century, inventors produced various hand-held devices in which one could view images arranged on a spinning wheel or disk that appeared to move. In 1889, William Friese-Greene (1855-1921) in England and Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) in the United States each decided to print multiple images on transparent fdm that could be projected.
Edison adapted this for use in his kine-tograph, which was the first camera specifically designed to film motion pictures, and his kinetoscope, which was the first motion picture projector. Both were patented in 1891, and the kinetoscope had its debut in New York as a peep-show device in 1893. Edison had failed to patent his inventions abroad, so it was possible for two brothers in France named Auguste (1862-1945) and Louis Lumiere (loo-myer') (1864-1948) to build what amounted to an improved version of Edison's kinetograph, which they called cinematographic The first large, full-scale projection of motion pictures on a theater wall which took place at the Grand Cafe in Paris on March 22, 1895. Edison went on to further refine his process, producing his own projector, the vitascope, which led to the first projection of a motion picture in a theater in the United States at Bial's Music Hall in New York City on April 23, 1896.
The impact of photography on all aspects of modern culture and commerce has been significant. Imagine how different modern mass communications would be without photographic images or motion pictures.