'View from the Window at Le Gras', made on a pewter plate around 1826 (c. 1826–27)
Nicéphore Niépce's heliograph, the earliest surviving picture made in a camera; now at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas
General knowledge · Inventions & discoveries
Photography
1826–1839
Invention — imaging
Fixing an image made by light took two ingredients that existed separately for centuries: the camera obscura, which projects a scene, and light-sensitive silver salts. Nicéphore Niépce made the first surviving picture from nature at Le Gras around 1826–27 after an exposure of many hours; his partner Louis Daguerre announced the sharp, one-off daguerreotype in 1839, while in England William Henry Fox Talbot produced a paper negative from which many positives could be printed. Talbot's negative-positive principle lost the beauty contest but won the future.
How to spot them
- ▸A camera obscura plus silver salts; a pewter plate at Le Gras and an exposure of many hours
- ▸1839: a process given free to the world by the French government, except in England, where it was patented
- ▸One process gives a unique mirror-like plate; the other gives a paper negative and unlimited prints
- ▸A gentleman scholar at Lacock Abbey; a book called The Pencil of Nature
Key facts
The mirror-like silver plate announced in Paris in January 1839 (1839)
Daguerre's process: astonishingly sharp, but a unique image that cannot be copied
'The Pencil of Nature', issued in parts from 1844 (1844–46)
Fox Talbot's book, the first commercially published work illustrated with photographic prints
The Oriel Window at Lacock Abbey, the oldest surviving negative (1835)
A tiny paper negative made by Fox Talbot, about an inch square
'You press the button, we do the rest' (1888)
George Eastman's slogan for the first Kodak camera, sold loaded with film and returned to the factory for processing
John Herschel gave English the words 'negative', 'positive' and 'snapshot' for it (1839)
He also found that hyposulphite of soda would fix an image permanently, the 'hypo' of the darkroom
Muybridge's galloping horse settled a bet about whether all four hooves leave the ground (1878)
Eadweard Muybridge's sequence for Leland Stanford; they do
Key ideas
- Silver halides darken where light strikes them; the trick is not making an image but fixing it, by washing away the unexposed salts so the picture stops developing
- A latent image, invisible until chemically developed, is what cut exposures from hours to minutes — Daguerre's mercury vapour and Talbot's gallic acid both exploit it
- A negative is a reusable master: this is why Talbot's line, not Daguerre's, leads to film, enlargement and mass reproduction
Quick-fire facts
- •Joseph Nicéphore Niépce called his process heliography, 'sun writing'; he died in 1833, before the public announcement
- •Louis Daguerre's process was announced to the French Academy of Sciences by François Arago on 7 January 1839, and the French state bought the rights and gave it to the world in August — except in England and Wales, where Daguerre had taken out a patent
- •Hippolyte Bayard produced direct positives on paper in 1839 and, feeling overlooked, staged 'Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man' in protest
- •Fox Talbot's calotype, patented in 1841, produced a paper negative; his patents are often blamed for slowing British practice
- •Frederick Scott Archer's wet collodion process of 1851 was sharper and faster, and he did not patent it
- •Kodak's first camera of 1888 held 100 exposures; the name was coined by Eastman to be short, distinctive and meaningless in any language
- •The first colour photograph was made by the three-colour method of James Clerk Maxwell, demonstrated in 1861 with a tartan ribbon
- •The autochrome, marketed by the Lumière brothers from 1907, was the first practical colour process, using dyed potato starch grains
- •Digital took over from film after Steven Sasson built the first self-contained electronic camera at Kodak in 1975; it weighed 3.6 kg and took 23 seconds per image
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- National Science and Media Museum — A history of photography
- Beaumont Newhall — The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present