A lil' bit of Photo History

I found this in the first chapter of my photo history book, Seizing the Light by Robert Hirsch:

"The idea of photography existed long before the invention of the camera. A primary function of visual arts originates in the desire to create the likeness of something or someone that was deemed worth commemorating. This human urge to make pictures that augment the faculty of memory by capturing time is at the conceptual base of photography. Since ancient times, artists and inventors have searched for ways to expedite the picturemaking process, eventually concentrating efforts on how to automatically capture an image directly formed by light.
"As early as the fifth century B.C.E., the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti discovered that light reflecting from an illuminated object and passing through a pinhole into a darkened area would form an exact, though inverted, image of that object. offering a prototype of the pinhole (lensless) camera. In the West, the first recorded description of the pinhole was made by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who around 330 B.C.E., during a partial solar eclipse, observed the crescent-shaped image of the sun projected through a small opening between the leaves of a tree. When these observations were first formalized into a camera remains uncertain, but by the tenth century C.E., the Arabian mathematician Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haitham) demonstrated how a pinhole could be an instrument and that images formed thrugh an aperature became sharper when the opening was made smaller. Although Roger Bacon's treatsies, Perspectiva and De multiplicatione specierum (ca. 1267), do not specially mention the camera, they indicate he used the optical principles to contrive an arrangement of mirrors in order to project images of eclipses as well as street scenses and interior views of his house. In Perspectiva communis (1279, John Peckham, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a likely student of Bacon, remarked about observing a solar eclipse through a pinhole in a dark place."
.... a few paragraphs later, it describes how Leonardo da Vinci, in 1490, wrote the earliest suriving description of the camera obscura (dark chamber), a device designed to reproduce linear perspective. "The camera obscura, the prototype of the photographic camera, was a large dark room that an artist physically entered. Light filtered through a small hole in one of the walls and projected a distinct, but inverted, color image onto the opposite wall that could then be traced."
Since then, many artists, mathematicians, scientists, and photographers have developed small, more compact and better photo taking devices. "Johannes Kepler had built a proto-portable camera: a human-size tent that could be dismantled and transported to make drawing easier. By the mid-seventeenth century, a scaled-down modification of Kepler's device meant that one did not have to enter into the camera but could remain outside of it and view an image projected onto a translucent window, a forerunner to the first truly portable cameras."
"Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765-1833) developed the first system for making images permanent through the action of light. Niepce was enthralled with lithography, but he lacked the drawing skills the process required. Originally, he sought to automatically transfer an image to a lithgraphy stone without having to draw it, but in 1814 Niepce and his elder brother, Claude, shifted direction and undertook experiments to "spontaneously" create original pictures through the camera instead of copying previous existing images. This make Niepce the first to actively pursue a process of making a permanent camera image.
"As early as 1824, Niepce used this process to make his first actual camera image from nature on a lithographer's stone, which he referred to as a point de vue. There is still disagreement among historians as to when Niepce first made permanent view from nature with a camera. Some state it was as early as 1822, others say 1827. A book written by Niepce's son Isodore in 1841 indicates 1824 was the first time Niepce "achieved definitive fixing of images from the camera obscura into his screen. Although these marvelous products were still imperfect, the problem had been resolved."

Joseph Niepce's creation: