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By Luis Gustavo. See how we research and review our content.
The oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera sits on a pewter plate about 16 by 20 centimetres, coated in a tar-like substance called bitumen of Judea. Nobody can say exactly how long it was exposed: tradition says eight hours, while one modern researcher who recreated the process concluded it took several days.
That uncertainty fits a history full of improvised chemistry, rival inventors and strange materials. The five facts below follow the word itself, the plates that came before film, the first digital prototype, and the sheer volume of pictures taken today.
1. The first photograph in history took hours to capture
Nicéphore Niépce made “View from the Window at Le Gras” in 1826 or 1827 at his estate in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, using a camera obscura and a process he called heliography. Light hardened the bitumen coating where it fell, and the parts that stayed soft were washed away, leaving a faint image in metal.
The eight-hour figure is the traditional estimate, but it is now contested. A researcher who reproduced Niépce’s method concluded the exposure took several days. The plate is normally displayed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and Getty Conservation Institute scientists confirmed in 2002–2003 that it is a bitumen image on a pewter base.
2. The word “photography” comes from Greek and means “drawing with light”
Sir John Herschel is usually credited with coining the term in 1839, joining the Greek phōs (light) and graphê (drawing or writing). The year was not an accident. In January 1839 Louis Daguerre’s invention was announced in Paris, and on 19 August the process was formally unveiled at a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts.
Daguerre did not patent it. Instead, the French government acquired the rights in exchange for lifetime pensions for Daguerre and Niépce’s son Isidore, then offered the process to the world free of charge. The exception was England and Wales, where Richard Beard controlled a patent.
3. The first cameras didn’t use film
Early images lived on hard, polished surfaces. Daguerreotypes were made on a thin layer of silver over copper, developed with fumes from heated mercury, a toxic step that the era’s practitioners rarely guarded against. Each one was a unique object with no negative, and in 1839 exposures ran from a few seconds to many minutes. Adding bromine or chlorine fumes later shortened them to roughly fifteen to thirty seconds in good light. Accounts suggest some workers saved a full day’s income for a portrait.
Paper arrived next, with William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype of 1841, which produced a negative that could yield many prints, and Frederick Scott Archer’s collodion process of 1851, which combined fine detail with that copying ability. Then George Eastman replaced glass plates with dry gel on paper, and in 1888 the Kodak camera went on sale for $25 with film for one hundred circular pictures. Owners mailed the whole camera back to Rochester, New York, and for $10 got prints and a freshly loaded camera in return.
4. The digital camera was invented decades before it became popular
In 1975, Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built a prototype around a Fairchild image sensor of 100 by 100 pixels, or 0.01 megapixels, producing black-and-white images only. The camera weighed about 8 pounds (3.6 kg) and took 23 seconds to record each picture to a cassette tape. Kodak filed a patent on its features in 1977, listing Sasson and Gareth Lloyd as inventors.
The ingredients had arrived only shortly before. The charge-coupled device was invented at Bell Labs in 1969, Fairchild produced its 100 by 100 chip in 1973, and Kodak built its first megapixel sensor in 1986. Mass-market digital cameras were still years away, which is why 1975 looks so early in hindsight.
5. Billions of photos are taken every single day around the world
Nobody counts them directly. One 2026 estimate from the research site Photutorial puts the annual total near 2.2 trillion photos, or about 6 billion a day, with roughly 94% taken on smartphones. A lower forecast from Rise Above Research is about 1.95 trillion. The gap between those figures shows how much of the total is modelled rather than measured.
The same source notes that most photo activity happens on private phones and cloud libraries, which are hard to audit, and that annual growth ran about 6% to 8% between 2022 and 2025. Set beside the hundred pictures a Kodak owner got from one loaded camera in 1888, the contrast is hard to picture.
The Pewter Plate That Vanished for 47 Years
Niépce showed his work to the botanical illustrator Francis Bauer in England in 1827. The Royal Society refused to consider his paper because he would not reveal his method, though the specimens were exhibited there in 1839. The plate was last shown publicly in 1905 and then went unseen for 47 years.
Helmut and Alison Gernsheim located it in 1952. Helmut heavily retouched a copy print, and that altered version was the only one published until the late 1970s. Harry Ransom bought the Gernsheims’ collection for the University of Texas at Austin in 1963. Getty scientists designed an oxygen-free display case, and in 2007 researchers at the Louvre used ion beam analysis to study the oxidation corroding the image.
Other reads that fit this theme: facts about great painters, music facts, behind-the-scenes movie facts and 3D printing facts.
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Eight hours or several days on a pewter plate, 23 seconds per image in 1975, a fraction of a second on a phone today: the story of photography is largely a story of waiting less.