Derek Pye On Photography - Timeline
0. six bottles of wine.
0. 1834: Henry Fox Talbot creates permanent (negative) images using paper soaked in Gin and fixed with a Tonic solution, and accidentally creates photography, which like football will always be English
0. 1837: Louis Daguerre creates images on silver-plated copper, coated with silver iodide and "developed" with warmed mercury; Daguerre is awarded a state pension by the French government in exchange for publication of methods and the rights by other French citizens to use the Daguerreotype process. Unfortunatley all Daguerrotypes are rubbish. Photography outlawed in France until the outbreak of the first world war and Daguerre is forced to work as a rent boy.
0. 1841: Photography is still English
0. 1861-65: Mathew Brady and staff (mostly staff) covers the American Civil War, exposing 7000 negatives. Only six come out nicely exposed.
0. 1866: Mattew Brady invents the light meter.
0. 1877: Edweard Muybridge, born in England as Edwina Muggridge, settles "do a horse's four hooves ever leave the ground at once" bet among gay San Franciscans by fixing a camera to each of the hooves.
0. 1888: first Kodak camera, containing a 20000-foot roll of paper, enough for 10000 2.5-inch diameter triangular pictures. The camera is too big to carry and hundreds of photographers are killed.
0. 1900: Kodak Brownie box roll-film camera introduced. Setting photography back 250 years
0. 1902: Alfred Stieglitz organizes "Photo Secessionist" show in New York City. It’s rubbish and the photographers are rounded up and shot.
0. 1921: Man Ray begins making photograms ("raymondographs") by placing bits or rubbish on photographic paper and exposing the shadow cast by a distant light bulb.
0. 1922: Man Ray’s friends buy him a camera. Phew.