1900: Portable Kodak Brownie box camera
In 1900, Eastman Kodak released the new Brownie dollar box camera. It was a rudimentary cardboard box camera with a simple meniscus lens that took 2 1/4-inch square photographs on 117 rolls of film (Wikipedia 2019). It was sold for one dollar. One hundred thousand of them were purchased in the first year alone. The Brownie was instrumental in putting amateur photography in the hands of the amateurs, as well as allowing the middle class to take their own "snapshots" (The Franklin Institute 2016).
Wikipedia. 2019. “Brownie (Camera).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. June 9, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownie_(camera).
Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownie_(camera)#:~:text=The%20Brownie%20was%20a%20series,sales%20of%20Kodak%20roll%20films.