The first photograph was taken in 1814 by Nicéphore Niépce using a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier in Paris; the photograph though was not permanent and it faded. Niépce built on a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz 1724: a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. While this was the introduction of photography, the history of the camera can be traced back much further. Photographic cameras were a development of the camera obscura, a device dating back to the Book of Optics 1021 of the Iraqi Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham Alhacen,[1] which uses a pinhole or lens to project an image of the scene outside upside-down onto a viewing surface.
via History of the camera – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.