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Photography

The invention of silver gelatine based photography changed the world as profoundly as any invention, including the printing press, railroads, airplanes and the personal computer. Silver gelatin media launched photography as a tool of creativity that expanded into a medium that became a powerful component of the world. As with all great discoveries and technological advances, it came from discoveries leading up to its use and the thousands of applications that followed. The Silver Hall of Fame recognizes individuals who contributed to silver’s amazing role in the history of the world.

Thomas Edison photo

Thomas Edison

Photographers
United States
Date of Birth: 1847 — 1937

"I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion ." --Thomas A. Edison, 1888

Edison, an incredible creator, patented 1,093 inventions. These included the phonograph, the kinetograph...

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Peter Mawdsley no photo available

Peter Mawdsley

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1824 — 1909

Peter Mawdsley invented the first photographic paper, the silver gelatin print, in 1873. It was the first photographic process that submerged exposed paper into chemicals, rather than using light, as the chief agent in developing an image. Due to its stability and ease of use, developing-out...

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Charles Harper Bennett photo

Charles Harper Bennett

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1840 — 1927

Charles Bennett was an English photographic pioneer. He improved the gelatine silver process developed by Richard Leach Maddox. In 1873 he created a method of hardening the emulsion, making it more resistant to friction, and larger. In 1878 he discovered that by prolonged heating the sensitivity...

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Louis Aim Auguston Le Prince photo

Louis Aim Auguston Le Prince

Photographers
France
Date of Birth: 1841 — 1890

Born in Metz, France, Louis Aim studied chemistry and physics at university and then worked as a photographer and painter. By the 1880s, he was one of many inventors trying to master the technology for what would become film. Le Prince's first camera had 16 lenses, which took "sequential...

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Wilhelm Rontgen photo

Wilhelm Rontgen

Photographers
Germany
Date of Birth: 1845 — 1923

Wihelm Rontgen was a German physicist who was the first person to systematically produce and detect electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as X-rays or Röntgen rays. His discovery of X-rays was a great revolution in the fields of physics and medicine and electrified the...

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George Eastman photo

George Eastman

Photographers
United States
Date of Birth: 1854 — 1932

George Eastman was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company. His invention of the Kodak camera, a name he coined, was a major reason for making photography accessible to the public.

In 1878, when he was 24, he bought a photographic outfit with all the paraphernalia of the...

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Antoine Claudet photo

Antoine Claudet

Photographers
France
Date of Birth: 1797 — 1867

Antoine Claudet was a French businessman who moved to London to open a glass warehouse. The daguerreotype process quickly attracted his interest and he returned to Paris to be taught its fundamentals by the creator himself, Louis-Jacques Daguerre.

Returning to England with an operating license,...

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Robert Jefferson Bingham photo

Robert Jefferson Bingham

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1824 — 1870

Robert Bingham was an English pioneer photographer, mainly active in France, making portraits and reproductions of paintings. He had a background in chemistry and was particularly interested in photographic processes and published a treatise on this subject in 1848. He later became the first...

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Richard Leach Maddox photo

Richard Leach Maddox

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1816 — 1902

Richard Maddox was an English photographer and physician who invented lightweight gelatin negative plates for photography in 1871. Dry plate is a glass plate coated with a gelatin emulsion of silver bromide. It can be stored until exposure, and after exposure it can be brought back to a darkroom...

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Henry Fox Talbot photo

Henry Fox Talbot

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1800 — 1877

Henry Talbot was an English polymath - a person whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects. His interest in photography led him to invent the salted paper and calotype process, also called talbotye, in the 1830s. In this technique, a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride was...

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Richard Beard photo

Richard Beard

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1801 — 1885

Richard Beard was an entrepreneur who profitably established himself in the coal trade in London. With his entrepreneurial spirit, in 1841, he paid Louis Daguerre 150 pounds for a license to use his technology. He set up photography as a business speculation and opened the world's first...

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Thomas Sutton photo

Thomas Sutton

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1819 — 1875

Thomas Sutton, who was born in Kensington, London, studied architecture before earring a Bachelor of Arts degree from Caius College in Cambridge. Photography first entered his life in 1841 when he posed for a daguerreotype portrait in Antoine Claudet's studio. In 1855 he set up a photographic...

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Louis Désiré  Blanquart-Evrard photo

Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard

Photographers
France
Date of Birth: 1802 — 1872

Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard was a cloth merchant from Lille, France who learned the calotype process from his druggist, a student of the inventor of the calotype, William Henry Fox Talbot. He developed a method of bathing the paper in solutions of potassium iodide and silver nitrate rather...

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John Johnson photo

John Johnson

Photographers
United States
Date of Birth: 1813 — 1871

John Johnson was born at Saco, Maine, U.S.A. in 1813. He was brought up in New Hampshire and, for a time, worked as an assistant to a jeweller and watchmaker in New York. He formed a business partnership with Alexander Simon Wolcott (1804 -1844), a New York instrument maker.

1839 was the year...

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Alexander Wolcott photo

Alexander Wolcott

Photographers
United States
Date of Birth: 1804 — 1844

Alexander Wolcott was an American experimental photographer, inventor, and maker of medical supplies and optical instruments. In 1839, he met John Johnson, a jeweller and watchmaker's assistant. 1939 was also the year that Louis Daguerre of France, in efforts to finance his developments, went...

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Frederick Scott Archer photo

Frederick Scott Archer

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1813 — 1857

Frederick Archer was an Englishman who apprenticed as a bullion dealer and silversmith. He moved on to work as a sculptor creating busts of well known people. In 1847 he began using photography as an aid for this work. He was unsatisfied with the calotype process and the paper negative. In 1849...

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Edward Land photo

Edward Herbert Land

Photographers
United States
Date of Birth: 1909 — 1991

November 26, 1848, marks a major day in the history of photography as American Edward Land introduced his Model 95 camera, which produced sepia-coloured prints in about one minute. It was the achievement of his efforts between 1943 and 1947 to create self-developing photography.

Land called his...

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Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre photo

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

Photographers
France
Date of Birth: 1787 — 1851

Louis Daguerre, was a French painter and physicist who invented the first practical process of photography, known as the daguerreotype. The first permanent photograph from nature was made in 1826/27 by Nicéphore Niépce but it was of poor quality and required eight hours exposure time. Niépce...

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Joseph Nicéphore Niépce photo

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Photographers
France
Date of Birth: 1765 — 1833

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, is credited as the inventor of photography. He was a French inventor, who first gained fame, with his older brother Claude Niépce, for their invention of the internal combustion engine. When lithography began advancing he experimented with this new printing technique....

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Thomas Wedgwood photo

Thomas Wedgwood

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1771 — 1805

Thomas Wedgwood, a son of Josiah Wedgwood of pottery fame, was an English inventor. He is the first person known to have created impermanent pictures by capturing camera images on material coated with a light-sensitive chemical. His practical experiments yielded only shadow image photograms that...

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Johann Heinrich Schulze painting photo

Johann Heinrich Schulze

Photographers
Germany
Date of Birth: 1687 — 1744

Johann Schulze was a German physician and anatomy professor who made a significant discovery in the development of photography when he observed that silver salts darkened when exposed to sunlight. In 1725, while attempting to create a phosphorescent material by combining a slurry of chalk with...

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Johann Zahn photo

Johann Zahn

Photographers
Germany
Date of Birth: 1641 — 1707

Johann Zahn, was inducted into the Silver Hall of Fame, not for his use of silver, but for his studies related to light and his interests in the production of the camera obscura, (latin for dark chamber.) Zahn, a German priest, was the author of Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive...

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Sir John Frederick William Herschel photo photo

Sir John Frederick William Herschel

Photographers
United Kingdom
Date of Birth: 1792 — 1871

Sir John Herschel was a scientist and astronomer, like his father, Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus. He floundered in his early schooling before focusing on math and at the youthful age of 21 he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London. He worked on a variety of projects...

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