Cameras have come a long way from the days of the camera obscura. Used by the ancient Chinese and Greeks, the camera obscura, a primitive precursor to the cameras we all use today, used a pinhole to project an upside-down image on a surface in a dark room.
Cameras, as we know them today, did not exist until the early 1900s. Nicéphore Niépce (Joseph Niépce) was the first person in known history to have permanently captured an image using a camera in 1816. His partner, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre made the next big stride in photography when he invented the daguerreotype, a process that used a silver plate or a copper plate covered in silver to capture images.
A camera is an optical instrument used to record images. At their most basic, cameras are sealed boxes (the camera body) with a small hole (the aperture) that allow light in to capture an image on a light-sensitive surface (usually photographic film or a digital sensor). Cameras have various mechanisms to control how the light falls onto the light-sensitive surface. Lenses focus the light entering the camera, the size of the aperture can be widened or narrowed to let more or less light into the camera, and a shutter mechanism determines the amount of time the photo-sensitive surface is exposed to the light. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera