Origins-Where it all Began
The word "photography" is derived from the Greek words "photo," meaning light, and "graphis," which means to write. Sir John Herschel was the first to use the term "photography," in 1839, the year the real photographic process became public. There are two different scientific process that make photography possible, and until these processes were put together, the amazing art of photography was not successful.
The first process was optical, which began with the Camera Obscura (dark room).
This process had been around for at least four hundred years prior to the chemical process, which is what makes the images permanent. The Camera Obscura had been in use during the Renaissance as a way to understand perspective. Artists traced a projected image inside the camera, but there was no way to fix the image. (The picture to right is what the original "machine" looked like.)
This diagram portrays the way the Camera Obscura worked, but there was not a way to fix the image permanently onto anything.
In the 1800s, Thomas Wedgwood made "sun pictures" by places opaque objects on leather that was treated with a silver-nitrate chemical. The images would appear but disappear quickly. This was one of the major problems people were facing during this time. They figured out to make images appear on different types of material, but none of them were permanent.