Back to the Victorians calendar
You may have noticed, when reading all this, that there is something different to the illustrations I have been using. No longer are they pictures or drawings of old events and people, now they are photographs.
Inventors had been working on being able to take a “photograph” for many years. Initial attempts meant you had to exposure the object you were photographing for a very long time, sometimes as long as eight hours. However by the mid 1800's improvements had meant this time was much reduced.
By the late 1860's wealthy families would have their photos taken and the picture would be put on glass.
Originally there were two main types of cameras. One was called a plate camera and took individual photographs on to a plate while in 1885 a man called George Eastman, an American, developed the use of photographic film which was loaded into the camera and could take more than one picture.
It then had to be sent back to the manufacturer to be developed. Eastman then made a simple camera for sale to the public. This was in 1888 and the camera was called the “Kodak”. It had enough film to take 100 photos.
In 1900 Eastman produced a very inexpensive, simple box camera which he called “The Brownie”. Developments of this camera were still on sale in 1956 and I know this because it was my very first camera and here's me and my little brownie camera in 1957.
Click here to follow one old man on his photographic journey.
