Candid Photos That Reveal What The World Looked Like Generations Ago

These days, taking a photo barely takes any effort. We pull out our phones, open the camera app and snap away as many times as we like. According to research from UK photo printing chain Max Spielmann, more than 90% of photos are now taken with smartphones.

Around 1.8 trillion are captured on phones worldwide every year, which works out to roughly 4.7 billion a day. It’s hard to even wrap your head around that number. Just imagine how many cats, lunches and accidental pocket shots are hiding in there.

Getting to that point took a very long time. One of the ancestors of the modern camera was the camera obscura, a darkened room or box that let light through an opening and projected an image onto a surface inside.

Artists used versions of it centuries ago to help with drawing. The big problem was that the image couldn’t simply be saved. That required people to figure out how light could leave a permanent mark on a material.

French inventor Nicéphore Niépce eventually managed to do just that. His 1827 heliograph, made with the help of a camera obscura, is considered the earliest surviving photograph produced in one.

Photography moved forward again in 1839, when Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype process was announced publicly. It created highly detailed images on silver-coated copper plates and soon became popular for portraits. By 1850, New York City alone had more than 70 daguerreotype studios.

Photography gradually became much more practical for ordinary people. In 1888, George Eastman introduced the original Kodak camera, which came loaded with enough roll film for 100 exposures.

Once people finished the roll, they sent the entire camera back to Kodak, where the film was developed and the camera reloaded. Suddenly, taking pictures required far less technical knowledge, helping move photography beyond studios and into everyday hands.

Another huge step came with smaller cameras. In 1925, the Leica I made its public debut as the company’s first 35mm camera in serial production. Its compact size made it much easier for photographers to carry a camera around and capture spontaneous moments.

That helped make Leica a favorite for street photography and photojournalism, where photographers often wanted to catch people and places as they really looked instead of carefully setting up every shot.

Meanwhile, another big change came when photographers finally figured out how to capture images in color instead of just black and white. In 1907, the Lumière brothers introduced Autochrome, the first commercially viable color photography process.

The results were color transparencies on glass, and taking them was still a long way from the simple point-and-shoot experience we know today. Color photography continued improving over the following decades, eventually becoming a normal part of family albums rather than something unusual.

Still, taking a good photo required plenty of work, especially when it came to getting the shot in focus. That changed in 1977, when the Konica C35AF became the world’s first commercially released autofocus camera. Instead of adjusting the focus by hand every time, photographers could finally let the camera do that part for them.

Around the same time, photography was starting its move from film to digital. In 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built an early digital camera prototype. It was about the size of a toaster and captured black-and-white images at just 0.01 megapixels.

From there, it was only a matter of time before digital cameras got smaller and eventually found their way into our phones.

Photography has come an incredibly long way from projected images inside dark boxes to billions of pictures being taken on phones every day. Knowing how much effort once went into creating a single photograph makes the old snapshots in this list feel a little more special. 

They preserved ordinary moments using technology that was still finding its way toward what we have today, and now they give us the chance to see how people spent their days decades later.

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