Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) diagrams the first camera, the Camera Obscura.

By means of the Dutch, the camera obscura arrives in Nagasaki, Japan.

Johann Heinrich Schulze discovers that certain liquids change color when exposed to light.

Tiphaigne de la Roche predicts photography in Giphantie.

7th of March, Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is born. He is famed as the first person to create a photograph.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele proves ammonia stabilizes darkened silver salts.

Gilles-Louis Chrétien develops the Physionotrace for profile portraits.

Otsuki Gentaku, an apprentice of Sugita Genpaku, describes, in an essay, the camera obscura, pronounced "donkuru-kaamuru" in Japanese

Robert Barker opens the first Panorama, prototype of future movie houses.

Thomas Wedgwood successfully captures images, but the silhouettes could not survive and hence where only temporary.

William Hyde Wollaston invents the camera lucida.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's attempts at a technique he called heliography (sundrawing) and records a view from his workroom window on paper sensitized with silver chloride, but he is not able to fully fix the image.

Single-wire telegraph is introduced.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce achieves his first photographic image with a camera obscura.

Sir John Herschel discovers, hyposulfite of soda, a photographic fixative.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce creates a photographic copy of an engraving superimposed on glass.

The invention of the Thaumatrope, a "persistence of vision" toy, is credited to John Ayrton Paris.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce creates permanent image through fixing