The Development Of Photography

The development of the printing press and, much later, the internet are recognized as being absolutely essential to the world that we know today. But I see the development of photography as being just as important.

Photography was not just invented in a single event. It was developed throughout the Nineteenth Century. It's progress coincides with that of modern technology in general. What I would like to point out here is that this is not a coincidence.

Humans have always required illustrations of things, going back to prehistoric times. A great amount of effort, by an accomplished drawer or artist, was required to produce these illustrations.

The development of photography, first chemical and then digital, changed everything. Producing the necessary illustrations, at least of things that already exist, now required only the touch of a button.

As important as photography was to the world, who can imagine the modern world without it? That was not, as I see it, it's main contribution. What it did was free people, as a whole, from the tremendous work required to produce illustrations so that they could produce technology.

Instead of putting their time and effort into making illustrations of things people, as a whole, became architects and designed the skyscrapers that appeared after easy photography became possible.

They designed the fractionating towers that could refine gasoline from oil and the internal combustion engine that replaced the steam engine.

Freed from making hand-drawn illustrations by easy photography people designed aircraft, the mass production of steel, electronic tubes and circuits, chemical molecules and medicines, electrical refrigeration, modern electric generation, telephones, movies and, radio.

How much of this would have developed as it did if the tremendous amount of work that it took to make hand-drawn illustrations was still necessary?

How did so many of the technical innovations that make the modern world come around almost at once, in the late Nineteenth Century? 

Most technology begins with drawings on paper. Before the invention of quick and easy photography, the work of so many people had went into making the illustrations that have always been vital to humans. The development of photography freed those people to design technology instead.

This was just as important to the modern world as the printing press or the internet.