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HISTORY · PHOTO, CINEMA, TELEVISION

The first cameras

Three machines grew from the same dark box: the still camera, the movie camera and the television camera. Here they are side by side, decade by decade.

Photography

  1. 16th c.Camera obscura with a lens, used as a drawing aid
  2. 1827Niépce: the oldest surviving camera photograph
  3. 1839Giroux builds the first commercial daguerreotype camera
  4. 1888Eastman's Kodak goes on sale
  5. 1900Kodak Brownie: the snapshot for everyone, at one dollar
  6. 1912Graflex Speed Graphic, the press camera

Cinema

  1. 1888Le Prince shoots the Roundhay Garden Scene
  2. 1891Dickson designs the Kinetograph for Edison
  3. 1895The Lumière Cinématographe; first paid screening on 28 December
  4. 1912Bell & Howell 2709, the first all-metal movie camera
  5. 1919Mitchell Camera founded in Los Angeles
  6. 1937Arriflex 35, the first reflex 35 mm production camera

Television

  1. 1923Zworykin files a television patent; another follows in 1925
  2. 1933The iconoscope, the first practical video camera tube, is shown
  3. 1946RCA TK-10 studio camera on an image orthicon tube
  4. 1950The vidicon tube makes smaller cameras possible
  5. 1950sRCA TK-40/41: colour with three pickup tubes
  6. 1956Ampex records television on 2-inch videotape

THE STORY

The camera only four people owned

The Bell & Howell 2709 was so expensive that Charlie Chaplin and three other people owned one; the rest belonged to studios.

THE STORY

Five to thirty minutes

In 1839 one daguerreotype exposure took from five to thirty minutes.

THE STORY

A press camera for sixty years

The first Speed Graphic appeared in 1912; later versions were made until 1973.