History and Technical Development
The earliest daguerreotype (invented 1839) photographic cameras did not have shutters, because the lack of sensitivity of the process and the small apertures of available lenses meant that exposure times were measured in many minutes. A photographer could easily control exposure time by removing and returning the camera lens' lens cap or plug.
However, as one increased sensitivity process replaced another and larger apertures lenses became available during the 1800s, exposure times shortened to seconds and then to fractions of seconds. Exposure timing control mechanisms became a necessary accessory and then a standard camera feature.
Read more about this topic: Focal-plane Shutter
Famous quotes containing the words history and, history, technical and/or development:
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
“The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women’s broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)