Timeline
1800-1829
Photography
- 1800: Thomas Wedgwood makes “sun pictures” by placing opaque objects on paper treated with silver nitrate; the images deteriorate rapidly
- 1819: Sir John Herschel discovers that thiosulfate solutions (hypo) can be used to fix images and make them permanent by halting the darkening of silver salts
- 1826: Nicéphore Niépce creates a permanent photograph
- 1829: Niépce begins collaboration with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
America
- 1820: U.S. population 9,638,453
- 1823: Monroe Doctrine proclaims that U.S. will not tolerate European efforts to colonize the Americas
1830's
Photography
- 1834: William Henry Fox Talbot creates a permanent negative image from which he prints a positive image
- 1838: Charles Wheatstone invents the stereograph
- 1839: Talbot announces the photogenic drawing; Daguerre announces the daguerreotype
America
- 1830: Indian Removal Act leads to the relocation of Indians and the 1838 Cherokee “Trail of Tears” in which 4,000 Indians died
- 1837: Panic of 1837 followed by 5 years of depression
- 1838: Samuel Morse demonstrates electric telegraph
1840's
Photography
- 1840: Samuel Morse opens a daguerreotype studio and begins teaching the process
- 1841: Talbot patents the calotype
- 1842: Herschel invents the cyanotype
- 1844: Mathew Brady opens a daguerreotype studio on Broadway in New York City
America
- 1845: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
- 1846-1848: Mexican-American War
- 1848: Gold is discovered in California; Alexander T. Stewart opens the first department store on Broadway in New York City; New York State grants married women the right to own property apart from their husbands
1850's
Photography
- 1850: U.S. census reports 938 professional photographers; Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard invents albumen paper
- 1851: Frederick Scott Archer invents the wet plate collodion
- 1854: J. Ambrose Cutting patents the ambrotype; André-Adolphe-Eugéne Disdéri invents the carte de visite
- 1856: Hamilton Smith patents the tintype
- 1857: David A. Woodward patents the first practical solar enlarger; Cutting makes important improvements to the wet plate collodion process
America
- 1850: Henry Clay secures the Compromise of 1850 over John Calhoun’s objections
- 1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- 1854: Republican Party formed for abolition of slavery
- 1855: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
- 1857: Dred Scot v. Sandford rules that African-Americans cannot be citizens and that Congress cannot restrict slavery in the territories
- 1858: First transatlantic cable sent by telegraph
1860's
Photography
- 1865: U.S. extends copyright protection to photographs and photographic negatives
- 1866: Cabinet cards are introduced in the U.S.
- 1867-1879: Four Great Geological Surveys of the West including the photographs of Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson
America
- 1860: Abraham Lincoln is elected President of the United States
- 1861-1865: United States Civil War
- 1863: Emancipation Proclamation frees 3.1 million slaves
- 1865: Abraham Lincoln assassinated; Thirteenth Amendment is adopted, abolishing slavery in the U.S.
- 1865-1877: Reconstruction in the South
- 1869: Union Pacific Railroad is connected with Central Pacific Railroad
1870's
Photography
- 1871: Richard Leach Maddox published dry plate negative experiments
- 1877: Eadweard Muybridge uses photography to capture a horse in motion
America
- 1870: John D. Rockefeller forms Standard Oil
- 1871: Indian Appropriation Act states that Indians are no longer recognized as independent nations with which the U.S. may negotiate treaties
- 1872: Congress establishes Yellowstone National Park
- 1874: First Impressionist exhibition in Paris
- 1876: Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone
- 1879: Thomas Edison patents the incandescent light bulb; Belva Lockwood becomes first female attorney to argue a Supreme Court case
1880's
Photography
- 1880: George Eastman establishes Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, NY; First halftone photograph is published in a newspaper
- 1881: Frederic E. Ives announces the first printing process allowing the mass production of halftones
- 1882: William de Wiveleslie Abney announces gelatin printing-out paper
- 1888: George Eastman advertises the Kodak camera with the slogan “You push the button, we do the rest.”
- 1889: George Eastman produces plastic roll film (nitrocellulose film)
America
- 1883: Supreme Court rules that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 forbids only state-imposed discrimination, not that by individuals or corporations
- 1885: Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1890's
Photography
- 1890: U.S. census reports 20,040 professional photographers
- 1891: Thomas Edison invents a motion picture camera which uses nitrocellulose film
America
- 1890: Superintendent of the Census announced the western frontier was closed; U.S. Population 62,974,714