'Historical Leaks': 50 Must-See Historical Pictures, Ranging From Wholesome To Heartbreaking

It is not only the visual representation of history in pictures that is captivating, but also the history of photography itself. It has come a long way from a box with a hole to a phone camera producing images of nearly professional quality.

You can trace the beginning of it to a thing known as Camera obscura. Translated from Latin, it means “dark room”, which is exactly what it is. The term describes a dark chamber with a small hole in one of the walls, which becomes the only source of light. The wall opposite the opening then projects an inverted image of the setting behind the hole.

Camera obscura became the foundation for a smaller, pocket-friendly version called a pinhole camera. It uses the same principle, but instead of a room, all you need is a small box with a dark-colored interior and a hole for the light to come through.

A pinhole camera was later developed with the help of an angled mirror that flipped the inverted view. However, that was not yet a picture as there was no way to imprint the image.

The first photograph ever taken is attributed to the French scientist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He was the mastermind behind heliography, a process of using sunlight to draw. By developing the technique, J. N. Niépce was eventually able to produce an image using a pewter plate. In 1826, he took the photograph “View from the Window at Le Gras” which some consider to be the start of modern photography.

J. N. Niépce continued to develop the technique with the help of a French inventor, Louis Daguerre. After Niépce’s sudden death, his colleague carried on working with heliography. Eventually, he presented an approach of his own, known as the daguerreotype process. It allowed him to produce images in physical form using a silvered copper plate and chemical reactions.

Further development of photography was pretty rapid. It only took around two hundred years to go from a box with a hole to your grandmother taking pictures with her phone. And they’re better than the professional ones in her days. 

Research shows that nowadays people only take 7% of pictures with their cameras and use smartphones for 92.5%. It also unveiled that a person stores an average of 2,100 pictures on their phone.

Let’s go back to a time way before the smartphone era. In 1839, an inventor and, surprisingly, a dentist, Alexander S. Wolcott, reached another milestone in photography. He was the first to get a patent for a camera, which was called the Daguerreotype mirror camera. Together with his partner, John Johnson, he was also arguably the first one to open a portrait studio.

As photography was gaining popularity, people all over the world found ways to develop it. They managed to minimize the time of exposure and capture movement, among other things. That is how they achieved a breakthrough in the history of motion-picture presentations.

Photographer Eadweard Muybridge took pictures of a moving horse by lining a series of cameras along its way. While trotting along, the animal would move a thread attached to each camera and release the shutter. The result was a sequence of pictures of the horse at different points of movement. However, the series received skepticism from some people. Muybridge proved them wrong by using a lantern-slide projector and showcasing the images one after the other.

Another turning point in photography was the introduction of colored images. Auguste and Louis Lumière were among the first to start developing ways to do it in the early 20th century. However, the first color camera appeared only in 1935, when Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes invented the Kodachrome film.