The history
2,400 years from a hole in the wall to the camera in your pocket.
Nobody invented the camera in one go. A Chinese philosopher noticed that light through a small hole paints an upside-down picture. Arab and European scholars turned that into a tool. Chemists spent a century learning to make the picture stay. Then engineers made it fast, cheap, colourful, digital and, finally, part of everyone's phone. This is that story, one step at a time.
c. 400 BCE
First written description
Mozi, China
1826–27
First surviving photograph
Nicéphore Niépce, France
1838
First photo of a person
Louis Daguerre, France
1861
First colour photograph
James Clerk Maxwell, UK
1975
First digital camera
Steven Sasson, USA
2000
First camera phone on sale
Sharp, Japan
400 BCE – 1700
People notice that a small hole projects an upside-down image, explain why, and add a lens, an aperture and a mirror. There's still no way to keep the picture.
400 BCE
c. 400 BCE
The Mohist Canon, a text associated with the philosopher Mozi, describes how light passing through a small hole forms an inverted image, and explains the inversion with light travelling in straight lines.
Why it mattered. It's the oldest known explanation of the principle every camera still uses.
330 BCE
c. 330 BCE
The Problems, a work attributed to Aristotle or his school, asks why sunlight through a square gap makes a round spot, and why a partial solar eclipse throws crescent-shaped spots through gaps in leaves.
Why it mattered. An early record that small openings project the shape of the light source, not the shape of the hole.
1021
1011–1021
In his Book of Optics, Ibn al-Haytham describes placing several candles outside a darkened room and seeing a separate image of each flame through the opening. Cover a candle and only its image disappears. He also argued, correctly, that we see because light enters the eye, not because the eye sends out rays.
Why it mattered. He turned the pinhole effect into a controlled experiment, and his Book of Optics shaped optics in Europe for centuries.
1502
c. 1502
Leonardo's notebooks (the Codex Atlanticus) describe the camera obscura in detail and compare it with the human eye.
Why it mattered. It links the camera to the eye, a comparison still used to teach both.
1544
24 January 1544
Gemma Frisius used a camera obscura to watch a solar eclipse safely, and in 1545 published a drawing of it: a room with a hole, and the eclipsed Sun projected on the far wall.
Why it mattered. The camera obscura became a scientific instrument, and astronomers kept using it to observe the Sun.
1550
Cardano suggested replacing the pinhole with a convex glass lens, making the image far brighter.
Why it mattered. The lens solves the pinhole's trade-off between brightness and sharpness, which is exactly what the box's first chapter shows.
1558
Della Porta's Magia Naturalis described the camera obscura as a way to entertain guests and help artists draw. Its 1589 edition added a lens and a mirror to turn the image the right way round.
Why it mattered. It made the camera obscura famous across Europe.
1568
Barbaro described narrowing the opening in front of the lens to make the image sharper: the first recorded use of what we now call an aperture, or stopping down.
Why it mattered. Every camera since has let you trade light for sharpness this way.
1604
Kepler used the Latin phrase camera obscura, “dark room”, and later built a portable tent version for drawing landscapes. He also explained how the eye's lens focuses an image on the retina.
Why it mattered. The English word “camera” comes from this: in Latin it simply means “room”.
1700 – 1851
Chemistry catches up with optics. Light-sensitive silver, then the first surviving photograph, then two rival processes announced in the same year.
1717
Schulze found that a mixture containing silver salts turned dark where light hit it, not because of heat. He made temporary words appear by covering a bottle with stencils.
Why it mattered. Light-sensitive silver was the heart of photography for the next 250 years.
1802
Wedgwood captured silhouettes and camera images on paper or leather treated with silver nitrate, and Davy published the results. But they couldn't stop the images darkening, so they could only be looked at by candlelight.
Why it mattered. Capturing an image wasn't the hard part. Making it permanent was.
1827
1826 or 1827
From an upstairs window, Niépce photographed the rooftops of his estate on a pewter plate coated with bitumen, which hardens in light. The exposure lasted at least eight hours, and probably several days, which is why sunlight falls on both sides of the buildings. He called the process heliography.
Why it mattered. It's the first camera image that still exists. You can see it at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.
1835
August 1835
Talbot made a tiny paper negative of a latticed window, with light and dark reversed. From a negative you can print many positives.
Why it mattered. The negative–positive idea powered film photography until the digital age.
1838
Daguerre photographed the busy Boulevard du Temple. The exposure was so long that moving traffic vanished, except a man having his boots polished, who stood still long enough to appear.
Why it mattered. It shows why exposure time mattered: anything that moved simply disappeared.
1839
19 August 1839
The French government bought Daguerre's process and published it for anyone to use. A daguerreotype was a one-off, astonishingly detailed image on a polished silver-coated copper plate, exposed for several minutes.
Why it mattered. Photography spread around the world within months. 19 August is still World Photography Day.
1839
Cornelius uncovered the lens, ran into the frame, sat still for a minute or more, and covered the lens again.
Why it mattered. Often called the first selfie.
1839
Herschel popularised “photography” (Greek for “drawing with light”) and later “negative” and “positive”. He also showed that sodium thiosulfate, “hypo”, fixes an image so it stops reacting to light.
Why it mattered. Hypo solved the problem that defeated Wedgwood.
1840
1840–1841
Petzval calculated a portrait lens with an aperture of about f/3.6, many times brighter than the lenses on early daguerreotype cameras. Voigtländer built it into a camera in 1841.
Why it mattered. Exposures dropped to under a minute, and the portrait studio business was born.
1841
Talbot patented an improved paper-negative process that brought out a hidden (“latent”) image with chemicals, cutting exposures to about a minute.
Why it mattered. Developing a latent image is how all film photography worked.
1843
Atkins published Photographs of British Algae, made by laying seaweed on light-sensitive cyanotype paper. The blue prints are still beautiful today.
Why it mattered. She's widely regarded as one of the first women photographers, and the first to publish a book of photographs.
1851 – 1925
Exposures fall from minutes to fractions of a second. Film comes on a roll, a camera costs a dollar, and colour arrives.
1851
The wet collodion process coated glass plates just before exposure. It combined the sharpness of the daguerreotype with printable negatives, and exposures fell to a few seconds.
Why it mattered. It made photography practical for portraits, war reporting and travel. Archer didn't patent it.
1861
17 May 1861
Maxwell showed a tartan ribbon photographed three times, through red, green and blue filters, then projected the three images on top of each other.
Why it mattered. Every digital sensor still sees colour this way, through red, green and blue filters.
1862
Ueno Hikoma opened one of Japan's first commercial photography studios after learning chemistry and photography from Dutch teachers in Nagasaki.
Why it mattered. Photography spread worldwide within a generation of its invention.
1878
Gelatin dry plates, proposed by Maddox in 1871 and made much more sensitive by Bennett in 1878, could be bought ready-made and kept for months. Exposures dropped to fractions of a second.
Why it mattered. Cameras could now be held by hand, and needed real shutters.
1878
June 1878
Muybridge lined up twelve cameras with very fast shutters triggered as a galloping horse passed. The photos proved that all four hooves leave the ground at once.
Why it mattered. A fast shutter showed something the human eye had never been able to see. It pointed the way to cinema.
1884
1874–1884
Lala Deen Dayal set up studios in India and became court photographer to the Nizam of Hyderabad. His thousands of glass-plate negatives record late 19th-century India.
Why it mattered. He's one of the most celebrated early photographers in India.
1888
The first Kodak came loaded with a roll for 100 pictures. When it was full, you mailed the whole camera back to Kodak, which developed the prints and reloaded the camera. A year later, Eastman switched to transparent celluloid film.
Why it mattered. Anyone could take photographs without knowing any chemistry.
1900
The Brownie box camera cost one dollar and was marketed to children.
Why it mattered. Snapshots of everyday life became normal.
1907
The Autochrome plate used millions of microscopic grains of dyed potato starch as red, green and blue filters, giving soft, dreamy colour photographs.
Why it mattered. A mosaic of tiny colour filters is exactly how a modern image sensor works.
1925 – 1975
Small precise cameras, single-lens reflex viewing, electronic flash, colour slides and instant prints.
1925
Barnack built a small, precise camera around the 35 mm film used in cinema, with a prototype from about 1913. The Leica I went on sale in 1925.
Why it mattered. A small camera with a sharp lens changed photojournalism. 35 mm is still the “full-frame” size today.
1931
Edgerton developed the electronic stroboscopic flash, with bursts of light lasting a tiny fraction of a second, and photographed bullets, milk drops and hummingbirds in mid-motion.
Why it mattered. Electronic flash is in almost every camera and phone.
1936
Two musicians working with Kodak created a colour slide film with rich, long-lasting colour. It was made for 74 years, until 2009.
Why it mattered. Colour photography became part of everyday life.
1936
The Kine Exakta is widely considered the first 35 mm single-lens reflex (SLR): a mirror shows you exactly what the lens sees, then flips up out of the way when you take the picture.
Why it mattered. Zahn's 1685 mirror, now inside a camera. SLRs dominated serious photography for half a century.
1948
26 November 1948
Land's three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn't see a photo straight away. The Polaroid Land Camera Model 95 answered her: a print developed inside the camera in about a minute.
Why it mattered. Instant results shaped how people expect photos to work, long before screens.
1968
24 December 1968
Anders photographed the Earth rising over the Moon's horizon with a Hasselblad camera and colour film.
Why it mattered. One of the most influential photographs ever taken.
1977
The Konica C35 AF was the first mass-produced autofocus camera. It measured distance and moved the lens for you.
Why it mattered. Focusing, the hardest skill of early photography, became automatic.
By the numbers
From a day-long exposure to one thirty-two-thousandth of a second: roughly a billion times faster. Values are typical for each technology and approximate.
1957 – 2008
Images become numbers. A chip that turns light into charge makes the digital camera possible, and it slowly replaces film.
1957
Kirsch scanned a photo of his baby son into a computer as a grid of 176 × 176 black-and-white dots.
Why it mattered. The first photo made of pixels.
1969
Boyle and Smith invented a chip that turns light into electric charge and passes the charge along, pixel by pixel, to be measured.
Why it mattered. It made digital cameras (and the Hubble Space Telescope's cameras) possible, and won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.
1975
December 1975
Sasson's prototype weighed about 3.6 kg, captured a 100 × 100 pixel (0.01 megapixel) black-and-white image, and took 23 seconds to record it onto a cassette tape.
Why it mattered. Kodak had invented the technology that would later end its film business.
1991
Kodak fitted a 1.3 megapixel sensor to a Nikon F3 body, wired to a separate storage unit. It was made for press photographers and cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Why it mattered. Newspapers began to go digital.
1993
Fossum's team developed the CMOS active-pixel sensor, which amplifies each pixel on the chip itself and can be made with ordinary chip-making processes.
Why it mattered. Cheap, low-power CMOS sensors are in almost every camera and phone today.
2008
The Lumix G1 removed the SLR's mirror and showed the sensor's live image on an electronic viewfinder, while keeping interchangeable lenses.
Why it mattered. Most new interchangeable-lens cameras are now mirrorless.
1997 – today
The camera merges with the phone, software starts doing the work of glass, and scientists build cameras that photograph black holes.
1997
11 June 1997
In the maternity ward, Kahn wired a digital camera to his mobile phone and a laptop and sent a picture of his newborn daughter to family and friends.
Why it mattered. The idea of instantly shared photos began here.
2000
November 2000
The Sharp J-SH04 had a 0.11 megapixel camera and could send photos to other phones. (Kyocera's VP-210 video phone, from 1999, had a camera too.)
Why it mattered. Within two decades, phones would take the large majority of the world's photos.
2007
The first iPhone's camera had only 2 megapixels and no flash, but it came with a big touchscreen and the internet in the same device.
Why it mattered. Taking, viewing and sharing a photo became one gesture.
2012
19 January 2012
The company that put a camera in everyone's hands, and invented the digital camera, entered bankruptcy as film sales collapsed. It later re-emerged as a much smaller company.
Why it mattered. A famous lesson in how technology can overtake its own inventors.
2018
Computational photography merges many quick frames into one picture, lining them up and averaging away noise. Night modes can make bright, clean photos in near darkness without a flash.
Why it mattered. Clever maths now does part of the job that big lenses and sensors used to do.
2019
10 April 2019
Radio dishes on several continents worked together as one virtual telescope the size of the Earth to image the shadow of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87.
Why it mattered. Still the same idea as Mozi's hole in the wall: collect light (here, radio waves) and rebuild an image.
2025
June 2025
Rubin's LSST camera, about the size of a small car, has a 3,200 megapixel sensor. Its first images were released in 2025, and it will photograph the whole southern sky every few nights for ten years.
Why it mattered. From 0.01 megapixels in 1975 to 3,200 in 50 years.
By the numbers
From 10,000 pixels to 3.2 billion in fifty years.
Did you know?
“Camera” is simply Latin for “room”. Every camera is still a dark room with a hole in it.
Because Niépce's exposure took so long, the Sun lit both sides of the buildings in the oldest photograph.
The first photo of a person exists only because he stood still to have his boots polished.
Your phone sees colour the way Maxwell did in 1861: through red, green and blue filters.
Kodak built the first digital camera in 1975, but stayed focused on film for decades.
The people
c. 470 – c. 391 BCE · Philosopher · China
His school recorded the earliest known explanation of the pinhole image.
c. 965 – c. 1040 · Scientist · Basra and Cairo
Studied the camera obscura by experiment in his Book of Optics.
1765 – 1833 · Inventor · France
Made the oldest surviving camera photograph.
1787 – 1851 · Artist and inventor · France
Invented the daguerreotype, the first practical photographic process.
1800 – 1877 · Scientist · England
Invented the negative–positive process.
1799 – 1871 · Botanist and photographer · England
Published the first book illustrated with photographs.
1831 – 1879 · Physicist · Scotland
Showed the first colour photograph using red, green and blue.
1830 – 1904 · Photographer · England and USA
Froze motion with fast shutters.
1854 – 1932 · Entrepreneur · USA
Founded Kodak and put roll-film cameras in everyone's hands.
1879 – 1936 · Engineer · Germany
Designed the Leica, the camera that made 35 mm the standard.
1909 – 1991 · Scientist and inventor · USA
Invented instant photography.
Boyle 1924 – 2011 · Smith born 1930 · Physicists · Canada and USA
Invented the CCD image sensor; Nobel Prize 2009.
born 1950 · Engineer · USA
Built the first digital camera at Kodak.
born 1957 · Engineer · USA
Led the invention of the CMOS image sensor used in almost every phone.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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