In 1839, the world of photography changed forever when French chemist Louis Daguerre announced the daguerreotype process, the first publicly available method of photography. The daguerreotype produced clear, detailed images on a metal plate, and it quickly became the most popular form of photography in the world.
The daguerreotype process had a number of disadvantages, however, including the fact that each image had to be individually exposed and developed, which was both time-consuming and expensive. In 1851, English photographer Frederick Scott Archer announced the wet plate collodion process, which produced negative images on glass plates that could be mass-produced. This new process quickly replaced the daguerreotype as the most popular form of photography.
The wet plate collodion process also had its disadvantages, however, and in 1884, George Eastman introduced the first commercially viable roll film, which made photography more accessible to the masses. Eastman’s Kodak company also popularized the snapshot with the introduction of the first handheld camera, the Kodak Brownie, in 1900.
The invention of the 35mm Leica camera in 1925 and the introduction of color film in the 1930s further revolutionized photography and made it more popular than ever before. Today, photography is an ubiquitous part of our lives, and it is hard to imagine a world without it.
