From darkened room to phone: how the camera shrank over two centuries
Every camera ever made, from a wooden box of 1839 to the one in your pocket, follows one recipe: a lens bends light into a sealed chamber, a shutter decides how long it stays, and something sensitive records it. What changed was size, price, and who got to press the button.
The camera obscura, a dark space where light through a small opening projects a scene, came first. In the nineteenth century Henry Fox Talbot, Nicéphore Niépce and other experimenters used it for chemical trials, then built boxes made purely for photography, gradually making them smaller and improving their lenses. The daguerreotype process, announced in 1839, gave manufacturers a commercial reason to build them, and by the 1850s designs and sizes had become standardised.
Dry plates and roll film later allowed cheaper, more compact models, most famously the first Kodak of 1888. After the First World War German firms led the field with precision instruments like the Leica and the Contax, while Eastman Kodak's 16 mm and 8 mm reversal safety films opened home movie-making to amateurs. During the Second World War effort went into aerial reconnaissance gear, and civilian progress slowed.
Japanese companies drove the next wave. Ricoh released the affordable Ricohflex III twin-lens reflex in 1952, and in 1960 the Olympus AutoEye became the first 35 mm SLR with automatic exposure. Electronics moved inside cameras during the 1970s in models such as the Polaroid SX-70 and the Canon AE-1. Digital cameras outsold film ones in the United States by 2003, and smartphones later made taking pictures an everyday habit, aided by software and AI that improve each shot.
Two controls govern exposure. The aperture opens in steps called f-stops, usually from f/1.4 to f/32, and each step up halves the light getting in; wide openings also blur the background. The shutter sets the duration, either with a spring-loaded iris in the lens or, more often, with curtains that sweep across just in front of the film or sensor.
Source: Camera
