Abstract
Photography started to be applied in sciences shortly after the announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839 and become one of the most important supporting disciplines for science. This review concentrates on the history of scientific research on photographic processes which was conducted at Charles University.
The most important was development of sensitometry which started by work of Vojtěch Šafařík (1829-1902) who thoroughly studied the dry process. Photographic work in the Institute of Physics (IP) of the Czech part of "Carlo-Ferdinand University" was initiated due to studies of X-rays (from 1895) and later the Institute of Photochemistry and Scientific Photography was founded within IP by Professor Viktorin Vojtěch (1879-1948).
In 1950-s this institute disappear and splitted into chemical part (colloidal chemistry and photochemistry) at Faculty of Natural Sciences and physical part (photophysics, studies of latent image and silver halogenides) at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics under leadership of Professor Ladislav Zachoval (1906-1982). His follower Professor Karel Vacek then turned interest from scientific photography into modern subjects of chemical physics and biophysics.