Today is World Photography Day (for information, see worldphotoday.com), which has been celebrated on August 19 since 2010.
1. The date celebrates August 19, 1839, when the French government bought the patent for the daguerreotype and released it “free to the world”.
2. The daguerreotype, invented in 1837, was the first practical photographic process.
3. The earliest known permanent photographic image, however, was created by a more complex process called heliography in 1826.
4. The exposure time needed to create that photograph was eight hours.
5. Thanks to digital cameras on mobile phones, more than 350 billion photos are now taken worldwide every year.
6. Around 250 billion photographs have been uploaded to Facebook.
7. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had a darkroom installed at Windsor Castle to indulge their passion for photography.
8. The first photo of the Moon was in 1851; the first photo of its dark side was in 1959.
9. The earliest known use of the word ‘photograph’ was in 1839 by the astronomer Sir John Herschel.
10. The earliest known use of the abbreviation ‘photo’ was by Queen Victoria in a letter in 1860.