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Photography for All - 1 - History of Photography ..
Photography Book

Photography for All

No matter how important the invention of photography was, it could not have flourished completely without a method easier than the wet collodion plate. This method was indeed the fastest method, but it required long treatments in dirty materials, heavy tools, and great skill on the part of the photographer. Improving the conditions of treatment and increasing the speed of the plate were the constant interest of researchers for many years.

To achieve this, they tried to preserve the plate from drying out by means of various substances such as honey, beer, wine, etc. The results of these treatments were never convincing. Some plates were preserved for several months, but with a noticeable loss in their speed. Several technicians and amateurs participated in achieving the dry plate.

Many believed that the solution was present in the collodion compound and its silver salts, provided that it could be preserved. A decisive step towards success was the discovery of a basic detector and inhibitor with tannin or tannin (a substance taken from oak bark) by Major Charles Russell. Two years later, two amateurs from Liverpool, Bolton and Sais, made a compound of tannin, collodion and silver bromide, which allowed the commercial production of dry collodion plates.

Another line of research was to find an alternative to collodion. As long ago as 1847, Niépce de Saint-Victor had suggested the use of gelatine, but he found it too soluble and slow to react. The first satisfactory results were due to Ha's photographer, Dr. Richard Leach Maddox, who produced a compound of gelatine mixed with cadmium bromide and silver nitrate. Maddox is considered the inventor of the gelatino-silver-bromide compound, although it was greatly improved by John Burgess in 1873, who developed the plates in an alkali pyrogallol reagent. A short time later, a plate was commercially marketed according to the method invented by Ha and an Englishman named Richard Kennett. The plates were quickly sensing as the heat cooked the compound, which was accelerating.

Another amateur, Charles Bennett, achieved the same results but in an improved way. He cooked the plates with silver bromide gelatin, raising them to a certain temperature over several days. By 1878 there were four British factories producing dry plates, and by then the automatic machine had already made its mark.

It is true that it was then possible to take photographs at stops shorter than 1/25th of a second, that is, by holding the machine in the hand without using a support. By 1880 a large number of small portable machines were being made, many of which were evidence of the skill and genius of the maker. There were very small machines that could be hidden in the handle of a crutch, in the frame of a watch, in a book, etc. These machines were known as "telegraph machines." This name was later dropped when the word Kodak became a synonym for "small machine."

The machine-box that came to be seen everywhere owed its existence to the presence of celluloid film compounded with gelatino bromide. Alfred Pumphrey's machine was the first to have a rotary button to advance the film. This mechanism had been invented by Herschel, who had described the possibility of "taking a photograph in a flash" at 1/10 of a second. In 1888, George Eastman released the famous Kodak machine: "Press the button and we do the rest." This machine marked the birth of the Eastman Kodak Company. George Eastman had coined the name Kodak, believing that it sounded the same in all languages. This machine actually combined all the features that could make it a universal, easy-to-produce machine. It was light and compact, and the photographer did not have to expose his film himself. For the first time, the machine could be loaded with film on a reel. In the first Kodak machine, the film had a paper substrate coated with a light-sensitive compound. This compound was removed from the substrate before the pictures were drawn. The reel had a capacity of 100 pictures. After taking all the pictures the whole machine was sent to the manufacturer who would show the film and transfer each negative onto the glass plate by pulling it out and when the machine was refilled it was sent back to its owner with the pictures of the previous film.

Kodak Creator:

George Eastman, inventor of the famous machines - cans. He conceived the name Kodak because it could be pronounced in all languages ​​and this name was easily remembered. He also developed the film with a reel on a paper substrate covered with a gelatinous compound silver bromide.

Kodak Machines for All:
Below is a page extracted from the Photographic Magazine in 1889, which is an advertisement for the Kodak machine. Although Kodak machines were produced in large quantities - on the left - they were precise machines. In 1889, the first celluloid film was produced, which quickly determined the abandonment of the paper substrate.