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The box form of camera obscura invented by a German author Johann Zahn.
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Thomas Wedgwood and Humphrey Davy experiment with such chemical as silver nitrate to produce an image on a glass surface. Silver nitrate becomes the key component of darkroom photography, but Wedgwood and Davy are unable to fix an image and prevent it from darkening when exposed to light.
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A Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen becomes the first person to see the Antarctic continent.
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Joseph Nicephore Niepce creates the first surviving photograph in 1826.
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An English inventor Henry Fox Talbot creates the world’s earliest surviving negative by taking a photo of a window at Lacock Abbey.
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Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre takes an image called of what is believed to be the first image of a man.
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An English scientist and inventor introduces calotype process, which involved producing a picture by coating paper with silver iodine.
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Anna Atkins publishes her book "Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions", which is considered to be the first photographic book.
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Henry Fox Talbot publishes a photography book using silver gelatin photographs.
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African-American orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass publishes "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave".
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African-American photographer Augustus Washington creates a studio portrait of an abolitionist John Brown with added props and background.
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Mexican-American War begins due to the westward expansion of the United States and the annexation of Texas.
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An American inventor Elias Howe patents the first practical sewing machine.
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The first women's rights convention takes place in Seneca Falls, New York.
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The first international exhibition takes place in London.
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A British inventor creates a technique called wet-collodion process, which involved involved adding a soluble iodide to a solution of collodion (cellulose nitrate) and coating a glass plate with the mixture.
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A British photographer Roger Fenton takes one of the first war photographs in Sevastopol during the Crimean War.
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Carroll photographs Alice Liddell, a daughter of his acquaintances, as a beggar maid. New use of photography for fiction and fantasy.
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A civil war photographer takes a photo of an American president Abraham Lincoln.
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A Scottish photographer Alexander Gardner publishes his photographic sketchbook containing 100 photographs of the American civil war.
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Richard Leach Maddox invents negative gelatin plates, thus coming up with a dry plate process that replaced wet plate process in the 1880s. The new technique involved mixing gelatin with bromide and silver nitrate.
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Yellowstone National Park, the first national park in the US is established.
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George Eastman introduces roll film on a flexible transparent base, which has remained the standard for film until the digital photography was invented.
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The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated on March 31, 1889 thus becoming the tallest structure in the world.
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Arthur Conan Doyle published the first Sherlock Holmes story in Strand Magazine.
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In 1897 Felix Hoffmann, a German chemist, was searching for medicine to help relieve his father’s arthritis when he created acetylsalicylic acid commonly known as aspirin.
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Alfred Stieglitz founds a movement called photo-secession that promotes photography as a fine art.
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Paul Strand introduces a new form of photography art called straight photography, that dealt with abstract forms and shapes in focus instead of being manipulated.
