By: Hutch Tidwell

Video Timeline

Chinese and Greek philosophers describe the basic principles of optics and the camera.

5th-4th Centuries B.C.

Isaac Newton discovers that white light is composed of different colors.

1664-1666

First Panorama opens, the forerunner of the movie house invented by Robert Barker.

1794

A French inventor, Nicephore Niepce, produces a permanent image by coating a metal plate with a light-sensitive chemical and exposing the plate to light for about eight hours.

Cameras are invented

1826

Louis Daguerre, a French inventor, develops the first practical method of photography by placing a sheet of silver-coated copper and exposing the camera with a light so the picture shows.

1830s

First American patent issued in photography to Alexander Wolcott for his camera.

1840

William Henry Talbot patents the Calotype process, the first negative-positive process making possible the first multiple copies.

1841

Josef M. Petzval, a Hungarian mathematician, makes lenses for portrait and landscape pictures, with the new lenses the pictures were higher quality and admit more line.

1840s

First advertisement with a photograph made in Philadelphia.

1843

Frederick Scott Archer invented the Collodion Process images required only two or three seconds of light exposure.

1851

Paper Film: a very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed.

1885

The panoramic camera patented, which was the Sutton.

1859

The earliest known recording was created by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the inventor of the phonautograph. It was a ten second recording of folk song “Au Clair de la Lune”. The recording was not discovered until 2003.

1860

Richard Leach Maddox invented the gelatin dry plate silver bromide process, which made it to where negatives no longer had to be developed immediately.

1871

Thomas Edison invents the phonograph, which uses an a cylinder that rotates against a stylist.

1877

Horse In Motion, Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking motion photography was accomplished using multiple cameras and assembling the individual pictures into a motion picture.

1878

Alexander G. Bell patented the telephone , it was the first electrical device for audible transmission.

1876

Eastman Dry Plate Company founded.

1880

George Eastman invents flexible, practical, paper-based photographic film

1884

Eastman patents Kodak roll-film camera.

1888

Movie MakingLumiere invented a portable motion-picture

camera

1895

Edward Raymond Turner from London patented his color film process.

1899

First mass-marketed (sold widely in stores to anybody who can aford it) camera, the Brownie.

1900

First film shot by Edward Raymond Turner become the earliest color film. This film was based on Turner's 1899 patents.

1902

The first theater in the world exclusively devoted to showing motion pictures was the Nickelodeon, which was opened on June 19, 1905 in Pittsburg Penn.

1905

First 35 mm still camera developed.

1913/1914

Walt Disney creates his first cartoon, "Alice's Wonderland."

1924

General Electric invents the modern flash bulb.

1927

Philo Farnsworth transmits the first electronic television image and applies for a patent on the first complete electronic system, the Image Dissector.

1927

The world's first television station is built in London; programs are experimental.

1929

Walt Disney's first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, hits theaters and becomes an instant classic.

1937

Black and White television

1939

RCA's First Commercial Color TV

1954

CBS and NBC begin regular color broadcasts, even though only one in 100 US households owns a color TV set.

1954

Japanese television network NHK begins development of a new television standard, which later becomes High Definition Television, or HDTV.

1968

The first true digital camera that recorded images as a computerized file was likely the Fuji DS-1P of 1988, internal memory card that used a battery to keep the data in memory.

1988