Photography

Daguerreotype Photography

In 1826, Frenchman Joseph-Nicephore Niepce took a picture (heliograph, as he called it) of a barn. The image, the result of an eight-hour exposure, was the world's first photograph. Little more than ten years later, his associate Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre devised a way to permanently reproduce an image, and his picture—a daguerreotype—needed just twenty minutes' exposure. A practical process of photography was born.

Kodak Brownie Camera

If you asked people in the 1950s, 1970s, or even 1990s what life would be like in the year 2000, a few probably would have had some pretty interesting answers for you. Futuristic clothing, spaceship-like cars, and advanced robotic systems to handle even the most ordinary daily tasks may have been among the responses. But now that we are well into the 21st century, we take a moment to reflect on an object that helped to usher in the beginning of a previous century.

First Motion Pictures

Eadweard Muybridge was born Edward James Muggeridge in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1830. He traveled to the United States in 1852 with the notion of someday changing his name to use the Saxon spelling (he eventually did by 1867). Muybridge worked as a commission merchant for American and English book publishers on the East Coast for a few years before moving to San Francisco. There he worked as a book dealer until 1860, offering finely illustrated American and English works.