MyCamera history

The French initially pipped the Brits to the post when Nicéphore Niépce took the first ever photo in 1827.

4. Daguerreotypes: Louis Daguerre created a more practical camera model in 1829.

Unfortunately, Nicephore Niepce passed away in 1833.

In 1834, Louis Daguerre introduced another photographic process called daguerreotyping and became the inventor of the modern-day camera.

In 1839, Louis Daguerre, the former partner of Niépce, created a practical photographic process with a daguerreotype.

The roots of Leica Camera go back to 1849, when 23-year-old Carl Kellner, a talented mechanic, founded his own Optical Institute in the German town of Wetzlar.

The daguerreotype would be replaced in 1850 by a new “colloid process”, which required treating the plates before using them.

Kellner's microscopes, which first left his Wetzlar workshop in 1851, generated images of exceptionally high quality and soon earned a him reputation in the scientific community.

Thomas Sutton developed the first camera to use single-lens reflex (SLR) technology in 1861.

In 1864 mechanic Ernst Leitz joined the Optical Institute.

When Ernst Leitz took over the directorship of the Optical Institute in 1869, the German engineer was only 27.

6. Instantaneous exposures: Then, in 1871, Richard Leach Maddox invented a gelatin dry plate that produced instantaneous exposures—functioning as a sort of precursor to the Polaroid cameras of the twentieth century.

In 1879, the company changed names to reflect its new director.

The first movie camera was invented in 1882 by Étienne-Jules Marey, a French inventor.

Then, in 1885, George Eastman began to produce and manufacture paper film.

American entrepreneur George Eastman created the first camera that used a single roll of paper (and then celluloid) film, called “The Kodak” in 1888.

Many historians and scientists believe that Thomas Edison is responsible for inventing the first movie camera because he had a patent on a device called a kinetoscope in 1891 (the same year that “A Trip to the Moon” was released).

The first use of the movie camera was in 1895 by French inventor Louis Le Prince.

But it was Kodak’s classic Brownie camera, launched in 1900, that really put the company on the map.

In 1901, these initial film cameras then gave way to Kodak's Brownie cameras, a cheaper variant.

It’s hard to pinpoint when people started calling these moving pictures “movies” because there are no records of anyone using this term before 1903.

In order to take pictures on his hiking trips, Barnack started experimenting with a plate camera in 1905, which he later modified to take 20 mini-pictures on one plate of film.

In 1911, Leitz hired a young Oskar Barnack, who was obsessed with creating the perfect portable camera.

The so-called 'Ur-Leica', or 'original Leica,' was equipped with the famous Elmar lens which was developed by German microscope expert Max Berek, who had joined E. Leitz in 1912.

In 1913 Oskar Barnack began to research the possibility of inventing a smaller camera that anyone could use.

Oskar Barnack Creates the Leica Camera in 1914

The earliest of these cameras were twin lens reflex cameras (or TLR for short), offered by the German company Franke & Heidecke in the 1920s.

In 1925 the Leica camera was presented to the public for the first time at the Leipzig Spring Fair and became an instant success.

In 1928, the first practical reflex camera came into light.

The result, which arrived in 1930, was The Leica One.

The first 35mm SLR was the “Filmanka,” which came out of the Soviet Union in 1931.

The Leica III, produced in 1932, included a shutter speed of 1/1000th of a second and was so popular they were still being made in the mid-fifties.

In 1933, the SLR design began to make rounds with the introduction of the Ihagee Exakta, a compact SLR that used 127 roll film.

35mm, or 135 Film was introduced by the Kodak camera company in 1934 and quickly became the standard.

Eventually, through much experimentation, inventors were able to develop a film that could capture colorBy 1935, Kodak was able to produce “Kodachrome” film.

Kodak themselves replied with the Retina I, while a fledgling camera company in Japan, Canon, produced its first 35mm in 1936.

In 1943, Edwin Land was on holiday with his family when his daughter asked why she couldn’t see the picture he’d just taken of her.

Germany and the Soviet Union were the main brains behind the earliest cameras but Japanese SLR cameras soared in popularity after 1945.

Edwin Land invented it in 1948, and his Polaroid Corporation cornered the market for the next fifty years.

In 1949 the company established a modern glass laboratory which developed specialty glass for optical lenses.

1952: Leica subsidiary and production plant is established in Canada.

Another legendary Leica model, the Leica M3, was presented to the public at the Cologne Photokina, the world's largest photography fair, in 1954.

The Contax FB, introduced by Zeiss in 1956, would be the last 35-mm model to carry the Zeiss name for many years.

By the 1960’s, Polaroid cameras were considered the most popular cameras at the time.

The first color photograph was created in 1961 by Thomas Sutton (the inventor of the single-lens reflex camera). He made the photograph by using three separate monochrome plates.

The 1965 Polaroid Swinger camera was a huge hit with consumers and helped make the Polaroid one of the best-selling cameras of all time.

In 1966, 150 Leicas were custom made for the NASA with oversized controls for advancing the film and opening the case so that they could be handled by astronauts wearing gloves on space missions.

The CCD was developed in 1969 by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who later earned the Nobel Prize in physics for their invention.

Due to shrinking demand and high development and production costs, by 1970 the Leica product line was no longer profitable.

In 1972 Leitz signed a partnership agreement with the Japanese camera maker Minolta.

In 1973 another production plant for Leica cameras went into operation in Vila Nova de Famalicao near Porto in Portugal.

However, the old rivalry with Zeiss and its Contax flared up again in 1974, as Zeiss had become part of a group that developed a new model, the Contax RTS, a single lens reflex system.

That is 12,000 times the resolution of the original device created in 1975.

His name was Steve Sasson and his first photo took a whopping 23 seconds to record onto a cassette. It wasn’t until 1976 that the US military found the first real-life application for digital cameras, in satellite technology.

Before 1978, a camera lens would need to be manipulated so that the clearest picture would reach the plate or film.

1986: Leica GmbH is founded.

The first digital camera was developed in 1988, but was never sold to the public.

The first commercially available handheld camera which used digital photography was the 1990 Dycam Model 1.

It wasn’t until 1991 that Kodak released the Kodak DCS, which was their first in a long line of digital cameras.

In 1992 a team of executives, led by Leica's president Bruno Frey and supported financially by a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, attempted a management buyout of the camera operations from Wild Leitz, but failed.

1996: Initial public offering of Leica Camera AG in Frankfurt/Main.

In 1998 Leica Camera was also confronted with a lawsuit that accused the company of profiting from slave labor under the Nazi regime.

Developed in 1999, it included a 110,000-pixel camera and a 2-inch color screen to view the photos.

Sharp was the first tech giant to release a camera phone with their first version in 2000.

Mirrorless camera: In 2004, Epson released the first mirrorless camera, a type of camera that works without a reflex mirror.

By 2010, Canon controlled 44.5% of the DSLR market, followed by Nikon with 29.8% and Sony with 11.9%.