Photography History Trivia

Photography took roughly a century to go from a fragile chemical curiosity to something almost anyone could do. The story runs from sunlit plates that needed hours of exposure to pocket cameras and instant prints.

This quiz covers the inventors, companies, and technical terms that shaped the first hundred years of the medium.

From Dark Room to Snapshot

A handful of breakthroughs turned photography from a specialist craft into a mass hobby.

• The camera obscura, whose name is Latin for "dark chamber," projected images long before anyone could fix them permanently.
• Nicéphore Niépce made the first surviving permanent photograph, "View from the Window at Le Gras," around 1826.
• The daguerreotype process was announced publicly in 1839, the year often cited as photography's official birth.
• George Eastman's Kodak put roll film in the hands of ordinary people with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest."

The Language of the Camera

Some terms from the early days are still stamped on cameras today.

• "SLR" stands for single-lens reflex, describing a mirror system that lets you look through the taking lens.
• Aperture is measured in f-stops, which control how much light reaches the film or sensor.
• Kodachrome, introduced in 1935, was the first commercially successful color film and stayed in production for decades.
• Polaroid built the first commercially successful instant camera, delivering a finished print in about a minute.