Cold Lake brought hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes last week, turning night into day in many areas. But when was the first lightning photographed?
According to the director of the EMY, Thodoris Kolydas, this happened on September 2, 1882! In the 1880s photographer William Jennings set out to prove that lightning was a very complex thing, more than just a simple zig zag in the sky that painters depicted in their paintings.
According to a 1939 article in Popular Science, the photographer started to photograph lightning with his camera, but his first attempts failed because the photographic films were not sensitive enough, reports kolydas.eu. Jennings was undeterred and a year later pioneering cinematographer John Carbutt produced a better quality film and gave it to him.
During a storm on the evening of September 2, 1882, Jennings made the first successful photograph of lightning. This image became famous on 9/5/1885 when Scientific American magazine published several of Jennings’ lightning photographs, prompting local newspapers to proclaim him the first to capture the phenomenon “correctly” on camera.
As Mr Kolidas says the word was correctly put in quotation marks as the achievement technically did not belong to Jennings. The first photograph of lightning may have been taken in 1847 by Thomas Martin Easterly, using the Daguerreotype process.
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