Surely you must start from the beginning with the wood-frame view camera used for early wet-plate negatives and daguerreotypes. If you look at early photos carefully, you will see the resolution of these photos is astounding - a result of a century of lens development.
Then we've got the early roll-film Kodaks you sent back to the factory for processing.
The SLR Graflex and the Graflex press cameras of the early 20th century.
Oscar Barnack's Leica.
E. Land's Polaroid.
From Kodak, the Instamatic and early digital cameras