The Evolution of Photography

1802	Thomas Wedgwood, following the experiments of Schulze and Scheele, produces silhouettes by use of silver nitrate but is unable to fix the images.
1806	William Hyde Wollaston invents the camera lucida.
1816	Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's attempts at photography he called heliography (sundrawing) records a view from his workroom window on paper sensitized with silver chloride, but he is only partially able to fix the image.
1816	Single-wire telegraph is introduced.
1816-26	Niépce achieves his first photographic image with a camera obscura.
1819	Sir John Herschel discovers the photographic fixative, hyposulfite of soda.
1822	Niépce succeeds in obtaining a photographic copy of an engraving superimposed on glass.
1826	The invention of the Thaumatrope, a "persistence of vision" toy, is credited to John Ayrton Paris.
	Niépce, using a camera, makes a view from his workroom window on a pewter plate.
1827	Charles Wheatstone describes a moving shutter.
1829	Niépce and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre form a 10-year partnership to develop photography.
1832	Joseph Plateau builds the Phenakisticope, an optical toy, that creates the illusion of movement by mounting drawings on the face of a slotted, twirling disk. Another image animation novelty, the Zoetrope (c. 1834) uses a rotating drum.
	Wheatstone invents a non-photographic stereoscopic viewing device.
1833	William Henry Fox Talbot begins experimenting with photogenic drawings.
1835	Talbot photographs window at Lacock Abbey.
1837	Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (portrait   shown) creates his first daguerreotype.
1839	The daguerreotype is publicly announced   at the Academy of Sciences in Paris.
	Hippolyte Bayard produces direct-positive images on sensitized paper.
1839	Giroux Daguerreotype camera is introduced; first commercially-manufactured camera..
	Alexander Wolcott receives first American patent in photography for his camera.
	The Petzval lens is introduced.
1840s	Portrait photography studies by D.O. Hill and Robert Adamson.
	American photographers Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes become known for their distinctive daguerreotype portraits. Well-known American figures of the day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, and Oliver Wendell Holmes are photographed by Southworth and Hawes.
1841	William Henry Talbot patents the Calotype process.
1843	D. O. Hill and Robert Adamson open portrait studio in Edinburgh.
1843	Anna Atkins produced the first photographically illustrated album entitled: British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
1844	Talbot publishes Pencil of Nature.
1845	Mathew Brady begins to photograph famous persons of his time, including Daniel Webster, Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper.
1846-47	Also in History: Irish potato famine.
1847	Louis Désiré Blanquard-Evard improves Talbot's Calotype process and sets up a photographic printing establishment.
1848	Claude Felix Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor uses albumen on glass plates for negatives.
1849	Maxime Du Camp travels to Egypt to photograph monuments.
	Stereophotography, which uses a double lens camera to produce two views that together produce a three- dimensional view, is developed.

1850	Mathew Brady publishes a collection entitled A Gallery of Illustrious Americans.
	Albumen printing paper is introduced by L. D. Blanquart-Evrard.
1851	Talbot makes first instantaneous photographs using electric spark illumination.
	Frederick Scott Archer publishes wet-collodion process.
1852	Talbot patents photoglyphic engraving which produces printable steel plates.
1854	George Eastman born July 12, 1854, in Marshall, NY. He grew up in the family home which was in Waterville, NY (outside of Utica, NY). The old Eastman homestead has since been moved to the Genesee Country Museum in Mumford, NY.
	A.-A.-E. Disdéri patents carte-de-viste portraiture.
	Ambrotype, a positive collodion image, is patented in US.
1855	Ferrotype process (tintypes) is introduced to US.
1856	Photojournalism of Crimean War documented by Roger Fenton, James Robertson, and Carol Popp de Scathmari.
1857	In Britain, photographer Oscar Rejlander creates allegorical multiphoto compositions.
1858	Francis Frith photographs scenes from Upper Egypt and Ethiopia.
	Henry Peach Robinson's photograph Fading Away, establishes him as a chronicler of the Victorian scene with multiple negative compositions of a life near its end.
1859	Sutton panoramic camera is patented.
1860	George Eastman, five years old, moves to Rochester, NY with his family.
	Abraham Lincoln is photographed during his first presidential campaign by Mathew Brady.
	Abraham Lincoln is elected 16th president of the United States.
	Nadar (Gaspard F. Tournachon) photographs Paris from a balloon.
1860s	Julia Margaret Cameron is known for her lyrical portraits of Victorian men and women.
1861	Francois Willeme opens a photosculpture studio in Paris.
	Oliver Wendell Holmes invents popular stereoscope viewer.
	James Clerk Maxwell's On the Theory of the Three Primary Colours.
	Chambre Automatique de Bertsch; first sub-miniature camera.
1861-65	Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and others document the Civil War.
1861-65	U.S. Civil War
1863	The Sharpshooter by Alexander Gardner (taken after the Battle of Gettysburg).
1864	Julia Margaret Cameron begins to photograph soft and impressionistic portraits that challenge the accepted ideas of focus.
	Joseph Wilson Swan perfects the carbo process.
1865	Abraham Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. The photograph to the left is an image of the execution of the Lincoln conspirators.
1865	Dubroni-In-Camera processing. The plates were sensitized, developed, and fixed within the camera inside a glass bottle that was part of the camera body.
1866	Carleton Watkins photographs Yosemite Valley.
	Woodburytype process is patented.
1868	George Eastman leaves school to help support the family. He works for an insurance company as a messenger boy earning $3 a week.
1869	George Eastman starts work for another insurance company with additional responsibilities, earning $5 a week.
	A Golden Spike for the Transcontinental Railway by Andrew J. Russell.
	Louis Ducos du Hauron's Colors in Photography describes the principle of color photography.
1870s	Pioneering landscape photography of the American West by Timothy O'Sullivan. Other notable landscape photographers include William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins.
1870-1871	During the Siege of Paris, pigeons are used to carry microphotographed messages across enemy lines.
	William Henry Jackson photographs Yellowstone.
	Richard Leach Maddox invents the gelatin dry plate silver bromide process.
1872	John W. Hyatt begins manufacturing celluloid.
1873	First photo is reproduced by the halftone method.
	Hermann Wilhelm Vogel increases the spectral sensitivity of photographic emulsions by adding dyes.
1874	George Eastman is hired as a junior clerk at Rochester Savings Bank, earning more than $15 a week.
	Léon Vidal combines chromolithography with Woodburytype printing.

1875	Émile Reynaud invents the Praxinoscope.
1877	Eadweard Muybridge experiments with multiple cameras to take successive photographs of horses in motion. He continued his photographic studies of motion, including human movements, from 1884-1887 at the University of Pennsylvania.
1877-78	George Eastman begins to take an interest in photography and takes lessons from George Monroe, a local photographer, for $5 to learn the process. He purchases his first photographic outfit for $49.
1878	George Eastman begins to simplify the complicated wet plate process.
	Karl Klic invented the most precise and commercially successful method of photogravure printing.
1879	George Eastman invents an emulsion-coating machine which enables the mass-production of photographic dry plates.
	Dennis Redmond develops the electric telescope to produce moving images.
1880	George Eastman begins to commercially manufacture dry plates.
	Muybridge demonstrates to an audience at the San Francisco Art Association Rooms his Zoopraxiscope, a Zoetrope adapted to project photographic images in motion.
1881	Eastman Dry Plate Company is founded.
	First book about television, The Electric Telescope, is published.
	Stephen Horgan's A Scene in Shantytown is printed in 'halftone' in the New York Daily Graphic.
1882	George Eastman begins experimenting with different emulsion support bases other than glass. With William Walker, a research person at Eastman's company, they devise a roll film holder, a flexible film and a machine to produce the film. The film is layered with gelatin emulsions on paper backing, which is stripped away after development.
	French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey invents the chronophotographic gun, a camera shaped like a rifle that records twelve successive photographs per second.
1883	Eastman Dry Plate Company transfers operations from rented loft space to a four story building at 343 State Street.
1884	Ottomar Anschutz's Stork's in Flight captures multiple images.
	Stebbing Automatic Camera is the first production camera to use roll film.
1885	EASTMAN American Film is introduced as the first transparent film negative.
1886-69	Heinrich R. Hertz produces radio waves.
1887	Thomas Alva Edison commissions W. K. L. Dickson to invent a motion picture camera.
1888	First motion picture films are made on sensitized paper rolls taken with a camera by Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince.
	The name Kodak is born and the KODAK Camera is placed on the market. It is loaded with 100 exposures on a film roll for $25. It is simply operated: Pull the string to cock the shutter, press the button to expose the film, and turn the key to advance the film. The advertising slogan is: "You press the button and we do the rest". After all the film is exposed, the camera and the film are sent back to the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Co. in Rochester for developing. The Kodak camera-fixed focus, 57mm lens, f/9, sharp from 3 1/2 ft. to infinity.
1889	Kodak #2 is introduced.
	The first commercial transparent roll film, perfected by Eastman and his research chemist, is put on the market. The availability of this flexible film makes possible the development of Thomas Edison's motion picture camera in 1891. A new corporation, The Eastman Company is formed, taking over the assets of the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company.
	Development of motion-picture roll film.
	Peter Henry Emerson's Naturalistic Photography handbook outlines aesthetics, which he calls naturalism.
1890	Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives. Realistic photographs of New York City living conditions prompts revision of tenement housing laws.
	Charles Driffield and Ferdinand Hurter publish their work on emulsion sensitivity and exposure measurement.
	Nadar, a famous Parisian photographer makes several studio portraits of George Eastman.
	Karl Ferdinand Braun invents the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT).
1890s	Dickson's kinetophone synchronizes the kinetograph and the phonograph.
	British photographer Frederick Henry Evans becomes known for artistic photography. He is part of the group known as the Linked Ring.
1891	Daylight loading film is introduced.
	W. K. L. Dickson and Thomas A. Edison patent the Kinetoscope, a type of viewing device in which a film loop ran on spools between an incandescent lamp and a shutter for individual viewing.
1892	The company becomes Eastman Kodak Company of New York.
	Frederick Ives develops first complete system for natural color photography.
1893	Fred Ott sneezing in Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894, filmed at the "Black Maria," a motion picture studio that rotates on tracks to follow the light of the sun built by Edison in West Orange, NJ.
	Thomas Alva Edison commissions W.K.L.Dickson to invent a motion-picture camera in 1887. Dickson's contribution to motion-picture and projection technology was a device to ensure intermittent but regular motion of the film strip and regularly perforated celluloid film strip to ensure precise synchronization between the film strip and the shutter. Dickson's camera is patented as the Kinetograph in 1893.
1894	Louis and Auguste Lumière invent the Cinématographe in Lyon, a combination camera-projector that can project moving images onto a screen.
	Edison opens the first Kinetoscope parlor in New York City.
	Photo Club of Paris is established.
1895	The Pocket KODAK Camera is announced.
	The birth of cinema: In Berlin, Max and Emil Skladanowsky show a 15-minute public program of films made using their Bioscop.
	First advertised public screening of films at LeGrand Café, Paris. The Lumière brothers' Arrival of a Train at a Station, one of the many actuality films or documentary views they made is screened.
	Auguste and Louis Lumière's Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.
	The Lumières and Edison demonstrate motion picture cameras and projectors.
	Eugene Atget begins to photograph Paris.
	Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovers x-rays.
1896	Public demonstration in New York City of the Edison Vitascope designed by Thomas Armat, bringing projection to the United States.
	Britain's first projector, the Theatrograph (later the Animatograph) is demonstrated by Robert W. Paul.
	Founding of Gaumont, oldest extant film company.
	Edison's John Rice-May Irwin Kiss (peep show epic showing a prolonged kiss).
	Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta publish stereoscopic Röntgen photographs.
1896-98	British photographers George Albert Smith and James Williamson construct their own motion picture cameras and begin production of trick films.
1897	Herman Casler and W.K.L. Dickson's American Mutoscope is the most popular film company in the United States.
	125 people, most of them from the upper classes, die during a film screening at the Charity Bazaar in Paris after a curtain is ignited by the ether used to fuel the projector lamp.
1899	Founding of Pathé-Frères, the world's largest film producer and distributor through WW I.
	Pascal - First roll film spring wind motor advance.

1900	First mass-marketed camera, the Brownie, costs $1.
	Max Planck introduces the Quantum Theory in Physics.
	Beginning of film production in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Scandinavia.
1901	Also in History: Queen Victoria dies.
1902	A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès, pioneer of film fantasy, special effects, and "trick films".
	Pathé acquires the Lumière patents and commissions the design of an improved studio camera.
	George Eastman purchases 8 1/2 acre East Avenue property in Rochester, NY.
	Alfred Stieglitz founds the Photo-Secession Group, dedicated to promoting photography as a fine art.
	Otto von Bronk applies for German patent on color television.
	Alfred Stieglitz edits and publishes the magazine Camera Work.
1902-05	Construction begins on George Eastman's house and grounds.
1902-12	Leon Gaumont's Chronophone in France and Cecil Hepworth's Vivaphone system in England produced hundreds of synchronized (sound and picture) shorts.
1903	American filmmaker Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery, is important for its use of realistic narrative and continuity of action.
1904-08	Alvin Langdon Coburn creates memorable portraits of famous men.
1905	Lewis Hine: "Ellis Island" series.
	Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen open the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (called "291") in New York City.
1905-07	Growth of film theatres in the United States. Named after the Nickelodeon, which opens in Pittsburgh in1905, they are makeshift facilities frequently in storefront properties.
1906	Screen aspect ratio of 1.33 : 1 established as an international viewing standard.
	Beginning of the animated film industry: J. Stuart Blackton's Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.
	Formation of Danish entrepreneur Ole Olsen's Nordisk, one of the decade's most successful production companies.
	Panchromatic plates are marketed by Wratten and Wainright in England.
1906-08	George Albert Smith and Charles Urban develop first commercially successful photographic colour process; Kinemacolor.
1907	Lee de Forest perfects the Audion tube, a triode vacuum tube that magnifies sound.
	Formation of Svenska Biografteatern, the leading Swedish film firm.
	Multiple-reel film comes to be called a feature: Adolph Zukor distributes Pathe's three reel Passion Play. Vitagraph produces the five-reel The Life of Moses in 1909, released at rate of one reel a week. Louis Mercanton's three-and-one-half reel Les Amours de la Reine Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth, 1912), stars Sarah Bernhardt.
	Lumière Brother's autochrome color process is marketed.
	Alfred Korn announces Fac-Simile telegraphy.
	Édouard Belin makes the first telephoto transmission, from Paris to Lyon to Bordeaux and back to Paris.
1908	Film d'Art's The Assassination of the Duc de Guise, is a transference of a stage play to the screen in an effort to legitimize motion pictures.
	Hollywood is founded in the Los Angeles area.
	The most powerful American film companies form the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), pool the 16 most significant US patents in order to establish a monopoly on domestic film production.
	Gabriel Lippmann wins a Nobel Prize for his method of reproducing color by photography.
1908-10	Working for Gaumont, Émile Cohl is the first person to devote his energies to drawn animation.
1908-14	D.W. Griffith and other American filmmakers systematize the use of the close-up, fade-out, iris dissolve, back lighting, soft focus, cross-cutting.
1909	Winsor McCay, cartoonist, produces first animated cartoon. Gertie the Dinosaur.
1910	Thomas Ince's New York Motion Picture Co. and the Selig company of Chicago set up studios near Los Angeles, initiating the establishment of west coast studio production.
	American cartoonist John Randolph Bray patents the cell process for film animation.
1910s	Lewis Hines: "Child Labor" series
	The serial episode film is the main attraction in many theaters in France, Germany, and the United States.
	Melodramas, westerns, and slapstick comedy are popular American film genres.
	Beginning of film production in Australia, Argentina, Canada, Ireland, Spain.
1911-16	Danish actress Asta Nielsen is the first international star whose fame is wholly dependent on her screen appearances.
1912	Mary Pickford in the leading role of D. W. Griffith's The New York Hat.
	Nikkatsu is formed out of several smaller companies to become the most powerful studio in Japan.
	Also in History: Titanic sinks.
	Vest Pocket Camera is introduced.
	First Model Speed Graphic is introduced.
1913	Italy's Cines company's nine-reel Quo Vadis?, shot using huge three-dimensional sets and 5,000 extras, establishes standard for superspectacles.
	Victor Sjöstrom's early masterpiece Ingeborg Holm.
	Eastman Kodak Company establishes first industrial photographic research laboratory.
1914	The 3,300-seat Strand opens in New York City, marking the end of the nickelodeon era and the beginning of an age of the movie palaces.
	Keystone Cops; slapstick comedy; visual humor.
	Autographic Film.
	First 35mm still cameras are developed.
1914-18	World War I
1915	D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a film of great technical assurance and innovation, is strongly attacked in the liberal and black press for its racist content and is banned in several states through the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
	Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp.
1916	Charlie Chaplin, international star of the American silent comic cinema, stars in The Pawnshop.
	Alvin Langdon Coburn's Vortographs: deliberate abstractions.
	Paul Strand's photographs emphasize abstract and objective qualities.
	3A Autographic with coupled Rangefinder is introduced.
1917	Mexico is the first country to formally protest the misrepresentation of its people by Hollywood.
	Foundation of Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), the largest studio in Europe for the next decade.
	George Eastman acquires additional 4 acres on western side of property; creates west garden.
1918	Following litigation for anti-trust activities, the MPPC is ordered to disband by the US Supreme Court.
	Oscar Micheaux, the most successful early African American producer/director, begins making films on black-related topics.
	Agit-prop trains, self-contained mobile propaganda centers equipped to disseminate entertainment and information to faraway posts, leave Moscow for the Eastern front.
	American cartoonist Winsor McCay creates what may be the first feature-length animated film, The Sinking of the Lusitania.
1919	Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith establish United Artists, a prestigious firm distributing only independently produced films.
	Lee de Forest, in collaboration with Theodore Case and E. I. Sponable, develop an optical sound-on-film process patented as Phonofilm.
	Nationalization of the Soviet film industry and foundation of the State Film School.
	George Eastman House is cut in two and conservatory is enlarged to improve acoustics.
1919-33	Golden Age of German cinema . UFA conglomerate becomes single largest studio in Europe.

1920	Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a foundation work of German Expression.
	Lev Kuleshov's Soviet State Film School workshop conducts experiments on film space and time.
	Formation of Shochiku studio in Japan.
	Also in History: In the US, women are allowed to vote for the first time.
1920s	Murder trial of film comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, murder of director William Desmond Taylor, and drug-addicted death of Wallace Reid are part of a cycle of scandals that increase public demands for greater industry regulation.
	Soviet cinema is influential for its strategies of montage, graphic approach to the film frame, "biomechanical" acting, and political use of the motion picture medium.
	French Impressionism is founded, a movement predicated on the belief that cinema is an artform of personal expression.
	Soviet silent era filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, now acknowledged as the father of cinema-verite (realistic documentary movement of the 1960s - 70s), produces a series of newsreel-documentaries.
	German Tri-Ergon process is developed, whose flywheel mechanism is essential to the continuous reproduction of optical sound.
	Edward Steichen becomes chief photographer for the fashion magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. His well known portraits include the veiled Gloria Swanson, the hands-to-head image of Greta Garbo, and the smiling Charlie Chaplin.
	American photographer James Van Der Zee creates memorable portraits of African-Americans.
	American artist Man Ray creates the Rayogram, a collage of objects placed onto photographic paper and exposed to light.
1921	First transatlantic telephoto transmission is made between Annapolis, Md., and Belin's laboratories at La Malmaison, Fr.
1922	Will H. Hays, former Postmaster General for President Harding, is appointed head of the newly created Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), a self-regulatory organization comprised of industry leaders.
	Founding of the Mingxing Film Company in Shanghai, the center of Chinese film production.
	Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, a point of reference for nonfiction and popular adventure filmmakers to follow.
	Successful subtractive process for two-color film introduced by Herbert Kalmus' Technicolor Corporation. Uses a special camera and procedure to produce two separate positive prints that are then cemented together into a single print. Used in films: Toll of the Sea (1922) and Douglas Fairbank's The Black Pirate (1926).
1923	Kodak introduces 16mm movie film for amateur use.
	Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments and James Cruze's The Covered Wagon, are examples of silent era big-budget filmmaking.
	Pola Negri and Ernst Lubitsch are wooed by American studios following the success of Madame Dubarry; starting a regular flow of European talent to Hollywood.
	Vladimir Zworykin patents television picture tube.
	First radio network is established by AT&T.
1924	Erich von Stroheim's naturalistic epic Greed is mutilated by studio interference.
	F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, notable for its innovative use of camera movement, subjective point-of-view shots, and optical effects.
1924-25	Ernst Leitz designs and markets the 35mm Leica cameras.
1925	Sergei Eisenstein's Potemkin, a powerful film retelling of the 1905 Russian Revolution.
	Western Electric, the manufacturing subsidiary of AT&T, perfects a sound-on-disc system called Vitaphone.
	"Little cinema" movement begins with the establishment of the Screen Guild in New York, a group dedicated to screening experimental works and films of historical and aesthetic significance.
	RCA patented sound-on-film system RCA Photophone.
	László Moholy-Nagy's Painting Photography Film. Experiments with photograms.
1926	George Eastman travels on his first safari to Africa to collect specimens for the American Museum of Natural History with big game hunters Martin and Osa Johnson.
	Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a triumph of production design.
	Following the completion of Son of the Sheik, Rudolph Valentino dies at 31 and is mourned by millions.
	Warner Bros. debuts Vitaphone to the public with a series of demonstration shorts and the feature film Don Juan.
	William Fox responds to Warners' success with Movietone, the first commercially successful sound-on-film process developed in conjunction with General Electric.
1927	Abel Gance's Napoléon is partially filmed in Polyvision and utilizes triptych sequences to produce wide and multiscreen effects.
	Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a City captures the kaleidoscopic movements of urban life.
	Box office success of The Jazz Singer sets film industries worldwide on the course of sound film production.
	The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is founded by industry leaders in response to mounting labor unrest in Hollywood.
	The Production Code of America, a self-regulatory code of ethics setting forth standards of good taste and specific "Don'ts and Be Carefuls," is created by the MPPDA under Will H. Hays.
	First Laurel and Hardy film Leave 'Em Laughing.
	Also in History: Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic.
	General Electric invents the modern flashbulb.
	Bell Laboratories perform the first mechanical television transmission in United States.
1928	Kodak introduces 16mm lenticular KODACOLOR Film for making motion pictures in color.
	Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie, starring Mickey Mouse, the first animated cartoon designed for synchronized sound.
	Technicolor introduces an imbibition or dye-transfer process for two-color films.
	RCA enters into film production by forming RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) and Warner Bros. takes over First National Pictures. Along with 20th Century-Fox, they join Loews and Paramount to form the "big five," an oligopoly that controls the American film industry for the next 30 years.
	Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, is shot in France with massive technical and financial resources.
1929	The Academy Awards are presented for the first time, with the Best Picture honor going to Wings.
	Motion picture cameras are standardized to run at a speed of 24 frames per second to ensure consistent sound synchronization.
	Postsynchronization is used by King Vidor in Hallelujah.
	Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera, is a film essay on the vicissitudes of perceptual reality.
	Also in History: The N.Y. stock market crash begins the Depression.
	Film and Foto exhibition that synthesized modernism in photography is held in Stuttgart.

1930	The Blue Angel, is an early dual-language production and the first of a series of films directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich.
	Luis Buñuel's and Salvador Dali's surrealist L'Age d'or provokes riots in Paris.
	Also in History: In India, Gandhi challenges British rule with civil disobedience.
	Chicago gangsters are a national fad; Al Capone in real life and Edward G. Robinson in the film Little Caesar.
	Gaspar bleached-color process is announced.
1930s	Nickolas Muray's photographs from the 1930s.
	Japan is the world's largest producer of film entertainment and the only country in which Hollywood films do not overshadow domestic product. Popular genres include the historical drama, the contemporary-life film, and melodramas.
	Gangster films and romantic comedies become staples of American sound cinema.
	Double features are introduced to counter Depression-era box-office slump, with "B" films shown for the second half of double bills.
	Opens with the Depression and closes with the beginning of WWII. Movies from this golden age of Hollywood help people escape or understand the troubled world. Child star Shirley Temple, Marx Brothers, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers are popular.
	Significant genre of movie musicals contingent upon sound.
1931	René Clair's early sound feature Le million and À nous la liberté combine musical comedy and politics.
	Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff chill millions in Dracula and Frankenstein.
	Also in History: The world's highest structure, the Empire State Building opens.
	The Great Depression worsens - breadlines are common.
	Harold Edgerton invents a repeatable short-duration electronic flash, which captured stop-action images that were beyond the perceptive capacity of the eye.
1932	George Eastman dies on March 14, 1932, in Rochester, New York.
	Walt Disney's cartoon short Flowers and Trees is the first film made using new three-strip, three-color Technicolor and is the first cartoon to win an Academy Award.
	Johnny Weismuller plays Tarzan in Tarzan the Ape Man.
	"Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica," the world's first film festival, is inaugurated by Mussolini at the Lido in Venice.
	Technicolor, a three-color system, is introduced.
	Ansel Adams founds Group f.64 dedicated to straight photography. Group f.64 photographers use large cameras and small apertures to record nature's light.
	First light meter with photoelectric cell is introduced.
	Phil T. Farnesworth demonstrates electronic television.
	8 mm Cine Camera and film are introduced.
	Electron microscope is developed in Germany.
1932-47	Eastman House serves as the residence for the president of the University of Rochester.
1933	In Queen Christina, Greta Garbo places affairs of state over those of the heart.
	With the Nazis' rise to power, Dr. Josef Goebells becomes Minister of Propaganda and gradually nationalizes the film industry. More than 1,500 filmmakers flee Germany.
	John Grierson, father of the British documentary movement, heads up the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit.
	The British Film Institute is established in London to "encourage the use and development of the cinematograph as a means of entertainment and instruction."
	Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong.
	Walt Disney's cartoon The Three Little Pigs in three-color Technicolor
	Technology is developed to mix separately recorded tracks for music, sound effects, and dialogue at a dubbing stage.
	Also in History: Prohibition ends.
	FDR launches the New Deal.
1934	It Happened One Night, is the first of series of populist Frank Capra comedy-dramas.
	Leni Riefenstahl, using 30 cameras and 120 assistants, films Triumph of the Will, a powerful Nazi propaganda film.
	Joseph I. Breen, director of the Production Code Administration, implements the Production Code in response to pressure from the Catholic Legion of Decency. It will remain in effect for more than thirty years.
	Bombay Talkies studio is formed in India.
	Retina I introduced using standard 35mm case.
1935	Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp, is the first three-strip Technicolor feature.
	"The March of Time," a monthly documentary newsreel series is produced by Time magazine.
	Foundation of the National Film Library (later National Film Archive) in London, the Museum of Modern Art Film Library in New York, and the Reichsfilmarchiv in Berlin.
	Frank Lloyd's Mutiny on the Bounty
	Eastman Kodak markets Kodachrome film.
1936	Charlie Chaplin speaks on film for the first time in Modern Times.
	Pépé le Moko starring Jean Gabin, is the fatalistic hero of French Poetic Realism.
	The Cinémathèque Française is founded in Paris by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju.
	Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange
	American combat photographer, Robert Capa captures on film the Spanish Civil War, notably Death of a Loyalist Soldier.
	Life magazine begins.
	American photographer Margaret Bourke-White takes the cover photo for first issue Life magazine.
	The Spanish Earth, directed by Joris Ivens with commentary written and narrated by Ernest Hemingway, is made as a response to the Spanish Civil War.
1937	Walt Disney produces Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first feature-length animated cartoon.
	Saint Tukaram, is a hugely popular Indian "devotional" film and winner at the Venice Film Festival.
	Opening of Cinecittá, a modern government-owned studio complex, is built on the outskirts of Rome.
	Zeppelin Hindenburg is destroyed by fire.
1938	Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Prokofiev collaborate on Alexander Nevsky.
	Leni Riefenstahl completes her two-part Olympia, a film record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
	Foundation of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF).
	American photographer Walker Evans has his first showing at the Museum of Modern Art, the basis for his book American Photographs.
	Chester Carlson invents Xerography.
	Super Kodak Six 20-Autoexposure is developed.
1939	Farmer and Wife by Arthur Rothstein from portfolio of FSA Photographs.
	David O. Selznick's Gone With the Wind and MGM's The Wizard of Oz, two enduring Technicolor classics, debut.
	French films Le Jour se lève and The Rules of the Game sum up the pessimism of a nation on the verge of war and occupation.
	The National Film Board of Canada is established under the directorship of British documentary filmmaker John Grierson.
	Hitler invades Poland, unleashing World War II.
	Television broadcast from New York World Fair.

1940	The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford's panoramic adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel deals with the Great Depression, debuts on film.
	Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, is his first Hollywood film following years of outstanding work in Britain.
	First of the Bing Crosby / Bob Hope / Dorothy Lamour "road" movies, Road to Singapore.
	Ansco, Agfa, and Sakura Natural color films are introduced.
1941	Orson Welles's Citizen Kane is celebrated for its innovative use of sound and flashback structure and for the deep-focus cinematography of Gregg Toland.
	Following the German invasion of the USSR, Mosfilm compiles short film reports, documentary sketches, satirical scenes, and musical numbers into several "Fighting Film Albums" to aid the war effort.
	Due to a nitrate fire at Svenska, the preeminent preserver of its nation's film heritage, the negatives of 95% of all films produced in Sweden in the preceding 34 years are destroyed in minutes.
	Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. The United States passes the declaration of war.
	First commercial television license is issued in US.
	Eastman Kodak introduces KODACOLOR negative film.
1942	WW II romantic drama Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, debuts as one of the most popular films of all time.
	United States government establishes Office of War Information to coordinate wartime propaganda with Hollywood. Frank Capra's seven-part "Why We Fight" series is produced over the next two years.
	Ansel Adam's Moonrise, Hernandez.
1943	The spirit of a nation at war: Fires Were Started, by British documentarist Humphrey Jennings.
	Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, is a key work of American avant-garde cinema.
1944	Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity starring Barbara Stanwyck, who is declared by the Internal Revenue Service the highest-paid woman in the United States.
	D-day.
1945	Marcel Carné's and Jacques Prévert's The Children of Paradise is released following the Liberation of France from German Occupation.
	Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City launches the Italian neorealist movement.
	The Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA) is created to promote the elimination of international trade barriers, negotiate agreements with other nations, and protect American copyrights.
	Nationalization of film industries in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia
	Atomic bomb on Hiroshima ends fighting, opens nuclear age.
	U.S. flag waves over Iwo Jima.
	V-J Day in Times Square by Alfred Eisenstaedt (sailor kissing a nurse).
	Arthur C. Clark proposes a geosynchronous satellite.
1946	Eastman Kodak introduces KODAK Ektachrome, the company's first color film processable by the photographer.
	Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, sets the standard for urban American crime dramas for the next decade.
	Hollywood's most successful year in its history in terms of motion picture attendance and box-office earnings.
	Establishment in Berlin of Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), a Soviet company that will soon pass into East German control.
	The first Cannes Film Festival is held, planned to open in 1939 but canceled because of the war. The first winner of the Palme d'Or is Maria Candelaria, a Mexican film photographed by one the world's greatest masters of black and white cinematography, Gabriel Figueora.
1946-50	New film types introduced in the late '40s: American films dealing with social consciousness; problems of racism, alcoholism, mental illness; semi-documentaries about criminal cases and film noir (fatalistic, dark interpretations of contemporary American reality).
1947	Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus, is a masterpiece of Technicolor design.
	In the first round of House Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings in Hollywood, political conservatives seek leftist content in film scripts. The "Hollywood Ten" are held in contempt of Congress and jailed for invoking the Fifth Amendment.
	Formation in New York of the Actors' Studio, soon to become the center for advancing "The Method" technique of acting embodied in the styles of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward.
	Also in History: Princess Elizabeth marries Prince Philip.
	Also in History: Britain grants India independence.
	George Eastman House, Inc., chartered as a museum of photography.
	Dennis Gabor describes the principles of holography.
	Bell Laboratories invents the transistor.
1948	The Bicycle Thief brings worldwide recognition to neorealist director Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini.
	S. S. Vasan's historical superproduction Chandralehka sets Indian cinema on the course of big-budget entertainment.
	Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle is denied an exhibition permit by the New York State of Censors on the grounds that it is blasphemous, setting in motion a series of ground-breaking court cases dealing with film censorship.
	Nationalization of film industries in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania.
	Also in History: The independent Jewish state of Israel comes into existence.
	Milton Berle begins Texaco Star Theatre.
	First 35mm Nikon camera is introduced.
	First U.S. cable television systems appear.
	Edwin Land markets the Polaroid camera.
	Hasselblad 1600F introduced.
1948-49	A wave of protectionist legislation in France, Britain, and Italy sets quotas on American film imports or screen time allotted to domestic product.
1949	Britain's Ealing Studios establishes its reputation for witty comedies with Passport to Pimlico, Whiskey Galore!, and Kind Hearts and Coronets.
	Following a decade of anti-trust litigation, the United States Supreme Court finds Hollywood guilty of monopolistic practices and hands down the Paramount decision, ordering the studios to divorce and divest their theater chains.
	Columbia Pictures converts its short-subject division to television production, beginning a trend other Hollywood studios would soon follow.
	The Communist Party in the newly established People's Republic of China founds the Beijing Film Studio and nationalizes the film industry.
	Also in History: NATO formed.
	Division of Germany