The Germans have invented several things I love, including the printing press, the hamburger, denim jeans, and contact lenses. But my favorite of these is the Leica, a camera I love so much it features prominently in my novel.

Of course, I’ve never owned one.

They were invented to make photography portable and cheap for German mountain climbers. My favorite part about the creation story of the Leica is that the internal name for the product, within the Leica company and in the patent application, is the Rollfilmkamera. That’s right, the ROLLFILMKAMERA. I’m going to start referring to all cameras this way from now on.

Because of the high quality of its lenses and it’s portability and durability, the Leica became the favorite camera of photojournalists, including Robert Capa, a Hungarian born photographer who witnessed the rise of Hitler and became an iconic figure during the Vietnam War. I’ll tell his story in my next post about the the history of photography.

The daguerreotype made photography popular, but it was still costly, and being a photographer meant own and hauling around a great deal of heavy equipment. It was difficult and time consuming to prepare and develop photographic plates, and the results were inconsistent.

After attempting and then canceling a trip to photograph Santo Domingo in the Caribbean islands, a young twenty-four-year-old photographer named George Eastman began researching how to make photography more convenient and less expensive. He developed and patented a gelatin-coated paper that came in a roll he called photographic film. He patented the emulsion process and the camera he invented to use it, and started the George Eastman Company of Rochester New York. Later, he renamed his company Kodak. He and his mother invented the name Kodak after playing around with an anagram word game. Eastman settled on the name because he felt it was simple and easy to pronounce, had a strong sound, and gave the company an identity separate from its founder. Later he would change his mind about that and amend the company name to Eastman Kodak.

Although the Kodak name would become synonymous with photography, George Eastman would die before the company became a runaway success, before the invention of Kodachrome and the Instamatic, before “Kodak Moments” and long before the company’s precipitous decline in the wake of the digital revolution.

In March of 1932, suffering from a painful and degenerative spinal condition, the same condition that left his mother wheelchair bound during the last years of her life, George Eastman shot himself in the heart, leaving behind a suicide note that said only, “My work here is done. Why wait?”

He was the first to take photography and make it something more than a profession, more than a special occasion. He changed the way we thought about capturing everyday moments, and in doing so we started to preserve these glimpses into the minutia and magic of life, capturing them on film for all time.

Long before he invented the single-wire telegraph system and Morse Code, Samuel Morse was a painter. Throughout the 1830s he traveled around Europe painting and studying art, spending a particularly large amount of time in Paris. It was there, in 1839, that Samuel Morse met Louis Daguerre. Fascinated with the daguerreotype process, Morse wrote to the New York Observer and passed along a detailed description of this new technology, word of which spread throughout America.

When he returned to America, Morse was swamped with students, including the young Matthew Brady, who was only sixteen years old. By 1944, Matthew Brady was so skilled at making daguerrotypes that he opened his own studio. Along with taking famous photographs of prominent Americans, Brady also took pictures of soldiers home on leave. It was then that he got what he called “itchy feet,” a great desire to travel around the country observing, and photographing, war.

The task was expensive and dangerous and he was discouraged by everyone he knew, but Brady persisted, and not only did he capture some of the most iconic images of war that we have today, he basically invented the field of photojournalism. His popular shows around the country displayed, for the first time, photographs of dead bodies, capturing the real horror of war in a way written accounts could not.

It is a cruel irony that Brady’s eyesight began to fail him and that the cost of pursuing photography ruined him financially. On a January day in 1896 he was hit by a streetcar and died shorty thereafter, penniless, in the charity ward of a New York Hospital.

Photojournalism took photography to a new level. Once a curiosity, then used for stiff and formal portraits, photography was transformed into a medium for visual storytelling

Nicéphore Niépce spent five years trying to create permanent photographic images, few of which survived, because although he could make photographic images appear on glass and metal plates, he lacked a good method for fixing the pictures permanently. Exposed to light, they faded with time. His work was brilliant but ephemeral, and most if it is lost.

Five years into his experiments, Niépce died unexpectedly of a stroke. At the time of his death he was so penniless and destitute that he was buried in a pauper’s grave. Luckily, he left his notes to his partner, Louis Daguerre, a fellow artist and scientist who would perfect the chemical process Niépce started by creating what become known as the daguerreotype.

What made the new process revolutionary is that Daguerre figured out that if you removed the silver halide crystals from the surface of the exposed photograph, the image would be come permanent. To do so, he used a chemical called sodium thiosulfate, known today as fixer.

In 1938 he created the photograph you see at the top of this post. It’s a scene from a street in Paris called the Boulevard du Temple. The photograph required a long exposure of about ten minutes. Therefore, what was at the time a very busy street in Paris is rendered deserted. That’s because during a long exposure, only those objects that remain stationary can be exposed long enough to show up in the photograph. Everything else disappears: the people, the horses, the carriages, the stray dogs. They all moved on with their lives, disappearing into the depths of time.

All but two. At the bottom of the photograph you can see two tiny figures, one standing, once sitting. A man is presumably having his shoes polished. We can’t see any detail, and we’ll never know who these two men were, but they were the first in the history of civilization to be fixed onto a photograph for all time.