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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.

Frederick Scott Archer

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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Richard Beard

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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Charles Harper Bennett

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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Robert Jefferson Bingham

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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Louis Désiré  Blanquart-Evrard

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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Antoine Claudet

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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Louis-Jacques-Mandé  Daguerre

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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George Eastman

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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Thomas Edison

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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Sir John Frederick William Herschel

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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John Johnson

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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Edward Herbert Land

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 Aim Auguston Le Prince

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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Richard Leach Maddox

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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Peter Mawdsley

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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Joseph Nicéphore  Niépce

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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Wilhelm Rontgen

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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Johann Heinrich Schulze

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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Thomas Sutton

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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Henry Fox Talbot

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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