Prior to the 19th century, capturing images required the talent of an artist and a whole lot of time.

The transition from capturing images as an art to that of a science took multiple innovations and discoveries.

Those innovations never really stopped as images went from being

captured physically to being captured digitally. Learn more about the history and

evolution of cameras and photography and how we went from the first cameras to the camera in your smartphone on this

episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The development of the camera was sort of a chicken and egg thing.

Both the camera and a light sensitive photographic medium needed to be developed for either one to make any sense.

Before these two things came together to create photography as we know it, they

had independent paths of development. It was only when they were both at a point that was developed

enough that we could have photography. The development of the camera side of things

was really the development of optics. The earliest discovery of something camera

like would have been the camera obscura. I covered this briefly in my episode on Vermeer but basically a pinhole in a very

dark room will project the image outside the pinhole into a room on the wall upside

down. The earliest known documentation of the camera

obscura effect was actually made in the fourth century BC in China so it's been

known for a very long time. Likewise lenses in some form existed for centuries.

Simple spectacles were made in the 13th century, but lenses and the art of lens grinding

really came into their own in the 16th and 17th centuries.

And this is what allowed for the creation of

telescopes and microscopes. The other big theoretical discovery that was

necessary was Isaac Newton's discovery that regular white light was actually made up of separate colors.

The camera obscura effect and the ability to bend light with lenses were obviously important,

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