Kathy Bates, age 13, of Tulsa, Okla.) for her question:
HOW DID PHOTOGRAPHY GET STARTED?
Photography started with a very simple idea, not at all like the complicated picture taking we know today. Step by step, the first simple idea got changed as people invented improvements. The granddaddy of the camera was called the camera obscura, and we know that it was used way back in the 1500s. But the modern type camera that takes instant permanent pictures was not invented until about 135 years ago.
Leonardo da Vinci was a master painter and one of the greatest inventors of history. He lived in Italy, some 500years ago and painted, among other things, that most famous of pictures called the Mona Lisa. He used his bright mind to invent amazing machines and also to probe the workings of the human body. Maybe he put these two interests together to invent the granddaddy of the modern camera, or maybe someone else invented it. In any case, we know that Leonardo used this so called camera obscura, way back in 1504.
The earliest of cameras used no film and took no permanent pictures. Actually, it was a small, dark room. The only light allowed to enter came through a hole cut into one of its walls. Rays of light struck an object outside the room and reflected through the hole. Things were set up so that these reflected beams shed an upside down picture on the opposite wall inside the dark room.
Leonardo used the camera obscura to figure out the workings of the human eye. He also used it to make drawings. Since the picture on the wall was not permanent, he drew around the areas of black and white to make an upside down copy of the object outside the room.
This does not sound much like our fancy modern cameras that take instant permanent pictures, even in true to¬ life colors. But in the 1800s, several inventors got busy and made all sorts of improvements. The hole in the wall became the camera shutter. Film was invented to capture the reflected picture in permanent form. Rows of pictures were taken on reels of film to make movies. And we can expect more fancy photography inventions in the future.
Some of the earliest photographs were called daguerreotypes, after Louis Daguerre who invented them. His camera took time to work, and the model had to sit perfectly still for several seconds. The modern type camera that takes instant pictures was invented in 1840 by William Talbot, who is called the father of modern photography.