Daguerreotype

The Daguerreotype is the first camera and took the first photo in history due to Heliography. Louis Daguerre and Joseph Nicephore Niepce were the inventors of the Daguerreotype.

Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre (1787-1851), born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis in France, was an artist and chemist who is credited as one of the inventors of photography (as he created the first camera).

The First Photograph

Born in 1765 in Chalon-sur-Saone, France, Joseph Nicephore Niepce was a French inventor credited with being one of the inventors of photography. Also, he developed heliography, a technique used to produce the world’s first known photograph in 1825. He later died on July 5^th 1833.

Niepce (Left) pictured with
Daguerre (Right)

The Daguerreotype was the first practicable method of obtaining permanent images with a camera. Daguerre had began experimenting with ways of fixing the images formed by the Camera Obscura around 1824, but in 1829 he entered into partnership with Niepce who, in 1826 had succeeded in securing a picture of the view from his window by using a Camera Obscura and a pewter plate coated with bitumen. Niepce called his picture-making process heliography (meaning-‘Sun Drawing’), but although he had managed to produce a permanent image using a camera, the exposure time was around 8 hours.

Niepce later abandoned pewter plates in favour of silver-plated sheets of copper and discovered that the vapour from iodine reacted with the silver coating to produce a silver iodide, a light sensitive compound.

After Niepce’s death, Daguerre continued with copper plates coated with silver iodide to produce direct positive pictures. He discovered that the latent image on an exposed plate could be brought out or “developed” with the fumes from warmed mercury. The use of mercury vapour meant that photographic images could be produced in 20-30 mins.