In 1826, French inventor Nicéphore Niépce aimed his rudimentary camera out a window in his home near Chalon-sur-Saône, France and exposed his primitive film plate, which he called a heliograph. Eight hours later, he ended the exposure, developed the first image taken of the outdoors, and the world entered the photographic age. Eight-hour exposures have some drawbacks; they don't show people, for example, whose images are washed out because they don't remain still for the requisite number of hours. In 1837, French artist Louis Daguerre developed a faster film technology that he named daguerreotype, which became the film of choice around the world for a decade. Eventually, daguerreotype was eclipsed in the mid-1850s by the wet collodion plate process pioneered by sculptor Frederick Scott Archer. While a chemical nightmare, this technology allowed for even faster exposures and, therefore, more photographic flexibility than daguerreotypes.
Film technology continued to improve right through...
