Max Aquino History Honors The Camera and its adaptations The 20th century was a time of innovation.
Americans made the transition from a more primitive lifestyle to a technologically reliant one. Most Americans were scrambling to create the next big thing to patent and to later capitalize on. As time passed, some of the greatest inventions remained in our everyday lives, which we still use today. These creations have improved our knowledge leading to a blossom of scientific advancements. There were many aspects of innovation throughout history, but there’s one invention that has become integrated into almost every aspect of our lives; the camera and other image capturing devices, like the camcorder.
The camera / camcorder fall under the same category of innovation, since the camcorder is essentially a camera that takes hundreds of pictures and just plays them back at a fast rate, creating video animation. Oxford pocket dictionary describes a camera as “a device for recording visual images in the form of photographs, film, or video signals”. Throughout history, the use of the camera has been applied into many different areas of use.
Winston Churchill once said that “The farther backward you look, the farther forward you will see .When we look back to the early 1800s we see a country void of modern technology. Lack of motor vehicles prohibited Americans from traveling far distances, potentially causing long distance families to grow apart. Before the invention of the phone in the only way to contact one’s family was by written letter, which could take months just to maintain minimal contact between a loved one. As time passed, our greatest minds and innovators invented new ways to solve our soon to be problems of the past.
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With the invention of the Ford Model T (by Henry Ford) the average American could now traverse the country to do what they pleased with a new sense of freedom that wasn’t there before. Revolution in the communications department brought us the home phone, cell phone and now the highly appraised smartphone. Looking back no one would have thought that the ability to take pictures, videos, play games, watch color movies and shoes, search the internet, provide light, text, call, email, would all be packaged into a lightweight portable computer that fits right in your pocket. More importantly we have advanced hospitals that utilize every aspect of modern technology to treat their patients.
In the past, doctors could only give generic advice and prescriptions due to the lack of information in the medical field. Knowledge of cancers , viruses, and other complex medical diseases were nonexistent. Today, doctors use cameras for diagnostics and surgeries, to communicate between departments, and to communicate with emergency vehicles that rush out at high speeds to pick up and save lives. Unfortunately throughout American history, our country endured two world wars that scattered the nation causing over 40 millions American lives to be lost. These wars fragmented and broke the country, resulting in the need to rebuild the nation. Although the wars were catastrophic to the nation, they sparked new medical strategies such as training field medics to aid injured soldiers on the battlefield, and the development of different procedures and antibiotics used to cure civilians from diseases and infections.
With all of the sickness instead of doctors going out to see patients, buildings later named hospitals were created for people to come visit doctors. Hospitals today use technology such as the camera which are essential for modern day procedures. Cameras can also be found in cars to increase driving safety, and phones giving us the ability to capture every moment with the touch of a button. The concept of image capturing has been around for centuries. Early humans painted each other and their surroundings with intentions of sharing memories and stories with others. Before the camera dominated the 20th century ,people used a method of flashing a bright light through a special film that would darken on areas of interest creating a very low quality black and white photo. This method was called Camera obscura. Film paper was invented in the late 1800s by George Eastman.
The film paper was made from a high quality shiny material called celluloid. (The standard material used to create old fashioned film reels). After developing film for other cameras for a couple years, Eastman created his very own camera and named it Kodak .The letter “K” had been a favorite of Eastman’s.
He is quoted as saying, “it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter.” George and his mother devised the name Kodak with an anagram set . He said that there were three principal concepts he used in creating the name: it should be short, one cannot mispronounce it, and it could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but Kodak . In 1907, Kodak became the first company to integrate its name and look into a symbol.
Starting in the 1930’s, Kodak adopted yellow and red as its “trade dress” colors. The first Kodak camera was a very simple box-shaped camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed, meaning it could take up to a minute to focus. Its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer. It gave us the ability to capture important events while providing proof and evidence to validate what was written in the papers. In other words it enabled normal people to document their moments and share it with others, opening a new era of documentation.
Kodak impacted America so much that the people even started to use the phrase “Kodak Moment” in everyday language to describe a moment that should be captured by a picture. The Kodak came preloaded with enough film for 100 pictures and needed to be sent back to the factory for processing and reloading when the roll was finished. Although the Kodak camera was made possible by technical advances in the development of roll film and small, fixed-focus cameras, Eastman’s real genius lay in his marketing strategy. By simplifying the apparatus and even processing the film for the consumer, he made photography accessible to millions of casual amateurs with no particular professional training, technical expertise, or aesthetic credentials. To underscore the ease of the Kodak system, Eastman launched an advertising campaign featuring women and children operating the camera, and coined the memorable slogan: “You press the button, we do the rest.” Within a few years of the Kodak’s introduction, snapshot photography became a national craze. Various forms of the word “Kodak” entered common American speech (kodaking, kodakers, kodakery), and amateur “camera fiends” formed clubs and published magazines to share their enthusiasm .
By 1898, just ten years after the first Kodak was introduced, one photography journal estimated that over 1.5 million roll-film cameras had reached the hands of amateur shutterbugs. The great majority of early snapshots were made for personal reasons: to commemorate important events (weddings, graduations, parades); to document travels and seaside holidays; to record parties, picnics, or simple family get-togethers; to capture the appearance of children, pets, cars, and houses . The earliest Kodak photographs were printed in a circular format but later models produced a rectangular image, usually printed small enough to be held in the palm of the hand. Most snapshots produced between the 1890s and the 1950s were destined for placement in the family album, itself an important form of vernacular expression . The compilers of family albums often arranged the photographs in narrative sequences, providing factual captions along with witty commentary; some albums contain artfully elaborate collages of cut-and-pasted photographs and text, often combining personal snapshots with commercial images clipped from magazines remained on sale until the 1960s. Cameras found their way in every aspect of life including war. Armies were now including photos of soldiers in their personal files for drafting as a form of identification.
Photos could also be used to identify the deceased providing families with proper closer over their loved ones. During war the camera allowed families to have a keepsakes of their fathers or sons as they were away from home. Photography also enhanced the image of political figures like President Lincoln, who famously joked that he wouldn’t have been re-elected without the portrait of him taken by famous photographer Matthew Brady. Intense images of battlefield horrors were presented to the public for the first time at exhibits in New York and Washington, many later reproduced by engravings in newspapers and magazines of the time allowing Americans to relate to war in ways they hadn’t been able to before. “Mr.
Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it,” wrote the New York Times on Oct. 20, 1862 about Brady’s New York exhibit just a month after the bloody Battle of Antietam.
Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography in Abilene, Texas, says the invention of the camera allowed families to have keepsakes of their family. “It was their most visceral, closest link to their loved ones,” Zeller said. “For girlfriends or wives at home, the only thing they had was the ambrotype” These images were taken by small-town photographers and traveling camp photographers. During the first World War more than a million pictures were taken.
Officers had their photos taken as well and often passed them out to the men as a morale booster. New ways to reproduce photos gave birth to cards. The Library of Congress has produced an exhibit of soldier’s portraits April 12 called “The Last Full Measure,” based on a private collection.
emplacements, roads, bridges and railroads. Black soldiers and slaves were also depicted for the first time, according to New York University professor Deborah Willis. “The placing of the images was significant in identifying that black soldiers found their place in the war,” Willis said. “They were working as soldiers and laborers. The fact is they also placed looked as if there are looking for hope. One of the biggest impacts of the camera on American society was in the entertainment industry. The inventions of the kodak film and camera impacted it greatly.
Kodak filmed transformed standard movie camera from an expensive low quality toy to a functioning device that could show America whatever it pleased. The very first screening took place in the early 1900’s the movie was a thirty second clip of a train pulling into a station. Having never seen motion picture before the audience screamed and ran for their lives as they thought a real train was speeding directly towards them. Everyone wanted to experience this new anomaly.
The high demand led to theaters opening up across the country. At the time silent films were very popular. Actors were hired for 25 dollars to act in these silent recordings.
The two genres were comedy and romance. Without sound it was hard to create elaborate plots .The first feature film to include sound was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone, which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures. People went to the movies for romance , to be scared , to bite their nails and laugh like they’ve never laughed before. Audrey Hepburn said “Everything I learned , I learned from the Movies.
Eventually motion picture made its way into every household in America. The television set allowed anything to be filmed and shared with the owners. Movie actors now became television stars touching everyone’s hearts. Families sat down together to watch popular shows like I love Lucy and Star Trek. The camera also changed the way news was shared. News companies used them to broadcast events in person creating an even more vivid image of what they were reporting. Today the film industry is worth 4.
8 million dollars. This one of the many aspects of business that the camera transformed. At the time radio commercials and drawn posters were the only form of advertising. All of the best radio ad had catchy jingles making the product line easier for the public to remember. Some examples are; State Farms’s “Like a good neighbor” , Bandaids Brand’s “Stuck on Bandaids” and Burger King’s “Have it your way” In 1939, the first televised Major League baseball game is broadcast on station W2XBS, the station that was to become WNBC-TV. Announcer Red Barber called the game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York. Video cameras enabled fans to now watch each play in live action instead of listening to highlights on the radio. Today 1.
01 billion viewers watch sports on their televisions worldwide and 60 percent of americans have sports on their tvs a month.The first ever ad was for Bulova watches in 1941. iIt cost a whopping $9 to air (just $4 dollars more than this reconstruction cost). The ad aired right before a dodgers baseball game. At Newspaper companies all around America used pictures for everything. They used them to create captivating front pages that would persuade anyone reading to purchase paper and read the other stories it had to offer.
Companies and small businesses would also pay newspaper companies to put pictures of their advertisements throughout the paper. The company demand was so high that eventually newspapers started housing separate pages dedicated for advertisements which we still have today. Irrefutable evidence has proved that cameras have made America a safer place. In 1969: The first video home security system is born. Marie Van Brittan Brown received a patent on her system which consisted of four peepholes and camera that could be moved to look through any one of them. The camera would broadcast its images to a monitor. Banks and retailers started using similar concepts in their buildings as an added security measure.
Camera footage could be used to identify threats to the police. After seeing the decrease in crime, and a possible market for security cameras , Walter bruch created a camera surveillance system called cctv (1942). CCTV were special broadcasts that streamed video feed to a device with the sole purpose of monitorization. When the government saw this technology they developed their own industrial camera that worked perfectly in low lighting and stored its information on a microchip enabling 24 hour surveillance. These new cameras were implemented in ATMS and when proved successful were sold to establishments. Eventually they were available to the public to install on their homes to provide the extra feeling of safety.
In fact if you install a security camera for your home today, your home is 300% less likely to be broken into compared with homes without surveillance cameras. Camera’s made criminals scared to commit crimes preventing some from even attempting. The UNC Charlotte of Criminal Justice found that 60% convicted burglars would look for security cameras before moving forward, and 40% of burglars said that the presence of security cameras would motiThe UNC Charlotte of Criminal Justice found that 60% convicted burglars would look for security cameras before moving forward, and 40% of burglars said that the presence of security cameras would motivate them to seek another easier target.ve them to seek another easier target. Today police have started to wear body cameras in order to capture every moment of the officer’s day. This way investigators can get clear images of cop surroundings and find things the officer might have missed that could be crucial to a case. On the other hand the cameras also ensure that the officers don’t step out of line because they know they are being monitored. Cameras have revolutionized the medical field.
Special cameras help with diagnostics and surgery. Endoscopies and Colonoscopies use a micro camera that can see inside of human bodies without having to cut them open. You might not think it but the same goes for X-rays and Digital imaging scans. Those cameras have machines attached to them that send radioactive waves through the patient. The cameras then pick up up the waves in the body , put them together and form a visible image that can be used to identify broken bones , nerve damage , or irregular muscle tissue. Nowadays all surgeon tools have cameras mounted on them so the surgeons can operate while staring at the enlarged live video on a high definition monitor. Prior to this the surgeons wore glasses with magnification lenses on the ends.
The operations had to pause momentarily with any small head movement. Doctors were even complaining that looking through the lenses caused motion sickness and nausea.While the camera is seen as a tool of creativity that allows people to capture every moment , it can also be seen as a tool used for the invasion of privacy. Today everyone has a camera with them whether it’s on their smartphone , tablet , laptop or a dedicated device. Countless amounts of people use the cameras on their devices for many different reasons, whether its capturing themselves with friends, or just appreciating beautiful scenery. On the other side of the spectrum cameras can be used to stalk people and take unconsented photos. A vast majority of privacy invasion cases involve men taking explicit, unconsented photographs of women. With cameras getting smaller and smaller and in virtually every device, perpetrators can carry them almost anywhere.
In 2014 a doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore recorded over 1,200 videos and 140 images of a patient with a small camera hidden in the tip of his pen. Over the last 5 years there have been dozens of cases involving men placing cameras and microphones in their victims bedrooms and showers to upload them directly to their laptops. The scary part is that these cameras look like everyday items and can be placed anywhere in plain site. In October of 2017 multiple cameras disguised to be coat hooks in women’s changing rooms were discovered in a department store when a flash went off while women were trying on. Some cameras have motion detectors, that only capture an image when movement is detected.
In Florida a motion camera was discovered in a women’s bathroom. Throughout the years with the introduction of smartphones and laptops with cameras, people have been concerned about others getting access to their devices and watching their every move. Although it hasn’t been proven, claims from multiple places on the internet state that devices make recording noises, or that their laptop lights turn on indicating the camera function is being used.
Some people believe this is a way for the government to keep eyes on us without coming down in person. On the other more practical hand, computer hackers have the ability to take remote control of your device and its functions. Although that can be scary, most hackers just seek to steal credit and banking information. This concept has been used in numerous aspects of the mainstream media, in films like the Fast and the Furious 7 and Marvel’s Agents of Shield. In Marvel’s Agents of Shield Shield – a government like agency- taps into civilian phones and traffic lights around the world to locate criminals at high speeds. The fast and the furious movie uses the same concept but its more on the illegal sides of things.
A team of convicts (including a computer hacker) uses a software named “Gods Eye” to locate a rival they plan on taking down. Even Mark Zuckerbeg – entrepenur , young marketing genius and creator of facebook – puts black tape over all of his device’s cameras (That goes to say something due to the fact that he made a social media site -that follows government regulation – enabling users to post pictures of their lives. In conclusion the camera changed how everyone lived.
Photos and videos have been implemented everywhere across the country for the better. Even our cars have cameras to prevent accidents and make parking and pulling out easier. Everyone has a camera on their phone. In 2015 105 billion pictures were taken by Americans alone. The camera has created careers and expanded our entertainment industries.
Although some Americans might use their cameras a bit too much overall they make for a safer country. They reduce crime , allow us to remember and document things forever, and make the world a safer place to live in.
