Frederick Scott Archer
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...
Richard Beard
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...
Charles Harper Bennett
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...
Robert Jefferson Bingham
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...
Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard
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...
Antoine Claudet
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,...
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
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...
George Eastman
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...
Thomas Edison
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...
Sir John Frederick William Herschel
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...
John Johnson
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...
Edward Herbert Land
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...
Louis Aim Auguston Le Prince
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...
Richard Leach Maddox
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...
Peter Mawdsley
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...
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
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....
Wilhelm Rontgen
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...
Johann Heinrich Schulze
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...
Thomas Sutton
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...
Henry Fox Talbot
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...