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A Brief History Of Light & Photography: Part 2 Of 3
The camera moves and photography is born
From Kepler & Galileo to the 19th century

This blog is the 2nd in a series:
See my 1st blog:
A Brief History Of Light & Photography: Part 1:
From Prehistory to the Renaissance
And my 3rd blog:
A Brief History Of Light & Photography: Part 3
The Modern Era: Kodak, SLRs, Digital Cameras and the Future of Photography

INTRODUCTION

The development of optics/photography is closely related to astronomy with Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Hubble making significant advances in both fields -- so in this timeline I have also highlighted their contributions to astronomy, a science of light. In addition, I could not help mentioning how often intuition, imagination, accident, spiritual feelings and even poetry played key roles in the scientific understanding of light -- not unlike the kind of inspiration that often guides experimental photography, my particular area of study. See the introduction to my first article that gives an overview of my approach.

THE CAMERA BECOMES PORTABLE

Kepler, Johannes
== Contributions To Optics and Photography:
In 1604 Kepler published the first modern western book on optics in The Optical Part of Astronomy (Astronomiae Pars Optica), designed the first portable camera obscura with a rotating lens and mirror to project the image onto a drawing board in 1620 and coined the term 'camera obscura' which has today evolved into the modern word 'camera'.

== Contributions To Astronomy:
Building on the Copernican theory of a heliocentric solar system about 60 years earlier, Johannes Kepler was the first to accurately describe the orbits of the planets.
== About His Insights:
Although a scientist who spent decades making careful measurements, observations and calculations, his inspiration was spiritual; he wanted to discover a harmony of the spheres, a medieval idea that described the harmonious relationships between earthly and heavenly realms. In his book Harmonices Mundi in 1619 (The Harmony of the World), Kepler layed out the third law of planetary motion along with an assertion that the movement of the planets related to each other in musical harmony. Kepler's three laws of planetary motion were fundamental to Newton's discovery of gravity.

The Invention Of The Telescope
In 1608 Hans Lippershey, an eyeglass maker, invented the telescope.
== Accident Played A Key Role:
According to legend, two children were playing with spectacle lenses in an eye glass shop owned by Lippershey in the Netherlands. They happened to line up two lenses so that a highly magnified image of a weather vane on top of a church appeared. This chance discovery lead to the telescope. Lippershey used a tube to position and secure the lenses which he called the "looker" in 1608; it was the first telescope.

Galileo Galilei
== Contributions To Optics:
Starting in 1610 Galileo increased the magnifying power of the telescope up to 30X. 
== Contributions To Astronomy:
While Galileo did not invent the telescope, he made a marked improvement on what was being made at the time. When he turned this instrument to look at Jupiter, he discovered four moons circling the large planet. This observation lead him to realize that Copernicus was correct, and that like the moons of Jupiter, the Earth and the other planets were circling the large Sun. Confirmation of this over the next hundred years or so, lead to a completely new understanding -- as humans were no longer at the center of the universe as had been previously thought in the Ptolemaic System (see Part 1 of this series of articles). In addition it lead to scientific observation and measurement becoming the primary way that the world was explored and that truth was established.

Newton, Isaac
== Contributions To Optics and The Understanding of Light:
In 1704 Isaac Newton defined light as particles in his book, Opticks, and also did extensive experimentation with white light and prisms in addition to creating the first reflecting telescope.
== Contributions To Astronomy:
Newton discovered gravity and then was able to calculate with precision this force that caused apples to fall to the ground and the planets to circle the sun, creating the first great unified theory. His three books, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (often shortened to the Principia), are considered perhaps the most important books in science.
== About His Insights:
After John Maynard Keynes studied Newton's papers on alchemy and other subjects, he said "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians..I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted...Certainly there can be no doubt that the peculiar geometrical form in which the exposition of the Principia is dressed up bears no resemblance at all to the mental processes by which Newton actually arrived at his conclusions."

PHOTOGRAPHY IS BORN

The Discovery Of Light Sensitive Material
In 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze noticed that silver nitrate turned dark when exposed to light. Silver halides became the basis for camera plates and film about 100 year later.

The Fixing Process
While Niepce and Louis Daguerre, another pioneering photographer who collaborated with Niepce and invented the daguerreotype, were able to 'fix' their photographs so that they did not fade -- it was not until 1839 that sodium thiosulfate, known to photographers as 'hypo', became the standard fixing chemical and has been used for that purpose ever since with film photography. Go to this site for a full history and description of photographic chemistry.

Astronomy Merges With Photography
Starting as early as 1840, cameras were designed to take photographs with astronomical telescopes. After 1900 large telescopes were optimized for photography rather than for observation -- making them essentially telephoto cameras.

Maxwell, James Clerk
== Contributions To A Scientific Understanding of Light:
In 1865 Maxwell wrote A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, a book that united light with other forces. He coined the term 'electromagnetic spectrum' and stated that light was simply part of a continuum from radio waves to x-rays. Finally he asserted that light, therefore, had to be considered a wave and not a particle as Newton had said. (Stay tuned -- as Einstein had the last word on this and what he said was crucial to the invention of digital photography.)

== Maxwell's Contributions To Photography
In 1855 Maxwell deduced that if an object were photographed three times on transparent black and white film -- each time with a different filter of red, green and violet -- a full color image would result from the combined photographs when projected together using the corresponding filters.
In 1861 Maxwell made the first color photograph using his method, and it has become the "the basis of nearly all subsequent photochemical and electronic methods of colour photography." (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell)

== Maxwell's Contributions To Astronomy:
Interested in a wide range of scientific questions, Maxwell wrote a paper On the Stability of Saturn's Rings -- which had been a nagging question to astronomers -- and explained how these rings were put together.
== About His Insights:
Although interested in a variety of scientific questions, Maxwell also wrote poetry throughout his lifetime.

NOTE: See a list of my other articles here at PIXIQ. www.pixiq.com/contributors/rick-doble

For more about my approach to photography see my book: Experimental Digital Photography.

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