Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Sharing is Caring: From Early Photography
to Cameras in Mobile Phones
When photography was fi rst developed in the 19th century (with the possible ex-
ception of the Shroud of Turin) photographs were unique objects that could be
owned
but not
shared
. This changed once the technology evolved into a copy-
able form (e.g., a negative used to make multiple prints). Sharing was now possible,
through the agency of the photographer (in the 19th century there were traveling
photographers in wagons who would set up local shop to make portraits).
An industrial form of the sharing of photographic images occurred with the
invention of halftoning, which extended the previous technology of woodcuts, steel
engravings, and other picture techniques used in books, pamphlets, and newspa-
pers to make inexpensive replicas on paper. Still, the original photographs had to be
physically transported from one place to another, so that a newspaper on the West
Coast could not have a picture of a New York event until a train carried the photo
from the East Coast.
In 1895 this changed, when Ernest A. Hummel electrically transmitted scanned
shellac on metal foil pictures over dedicated circuits between the New York Her-
ald and four other newspapers. This developed in an experimental way for several
decades until in 1929 Vladimir Zworykin, the pivotal television system inventor, came
up with a system that could scan and transmit in under a minute, enabling wide-
spread adoption within the newspaper industry—which repurposed the already ro-
bust voice telephone system to carry the new “Wirephoto” data.
The technology remained expensive and in the realm of corporations. Ordinary
people did not reproduce pictures to share without taking negatives to a photofi n-
isher (often a service at a local drugstore).
The technology started to change in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the mid-
80s I worked at a research lab in Silicon Valley on inkjet printing; we could not af-
ford a color digital scanner, and purchased a number of “standard” images on great
reels of magnetic tape. By 1991, this had changed enough that I was able to person-
ally purchase a 24-bit fl atbed scanner for $1,200 that would make three passes over
about fi ve minutes and produce a “high resolution” 300dpi color scan that I could
see and manipulate on my Macintosh IIc personal computer. I could even (painfully)
email these scans to friends, assuming they had a color display. But I still used fi lm in
a 35mm camera to take pictures.
