Daguerreotype (1839): Daguerre Gives Photography to the World

The daguerreotype was the first practical photographic process, developed by the French artist Louis Daguerre and announced to the Academy of Sciences in Paris on 7 January 1839. Later that year the French government bought the invention and published the method on 19 August 1839, presenting it as a gift to the world. Within months daguerreotype cameras were in use across Europe and the Americas, and photography had begun.

Background: Niépce and Daguerre

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) was a successful stage designer and painter who ran the Diorama in Paris, a theatre of huge illuminated paintings whose lighting changed to suggest time passing. Like many artists, he used the camera obscura to help with drawing and wanted to fix its fleeting image permanently.

The first person to achieve that was Nicéphore Niépce, who made the earliest surviving camera photograph at his estate near Chalon-sur-Saône in about 1826–1827, with an exposure of many hours or even days. In December 1829 Niépce and Daguerre signed a partnership to improve the process. Niépce died in 1833, and Daguerre continued with his son, Isidore Niépce.

How the process worked

Daguerre’s key discoveries came in the mid-1830s. He found that a silver surface made light-sensitive with iodine would hold an invisible “latent image” after a fairly short exposure, and that the image could be brought out by fumes of heated mercury. In 1837 he learned to fix the result with a strong solution of common salt, so that it no longer darkened in daylight.

A daguerreotype was made in several stages:

• A copper plate coated with silver was polished to a mirror finish.
• It was exposed to iodine vapour, forming a thin light-sensitive layer of silver iodide.
• It was exposed in the camera, at first for several minutes in bright light.
• The latent image was developed over a dish of mercury warmed by a lamp.
• The plate was fixed, rinsed and dried, and usually sealed behind glass in a case.

The result was astonishingly sharp, but it was a one-off: a laterally reversed positive image on metal that had to be tilted to the light to be seen properly and could not be printed. Improvements soon followed. Sodium thiosulphate, proposed as a fixer by John Herschel, replaced salt; bromine and chlorine made plates more sensitive; and gilding with gold chloride, introduced by Hippolyte Fizeau in 1840, made images more durable.

The announcement and the gift to the world

Daguerre at first tried to sell the process by subscription, without success. He then turned to François Arago, the astronomer, physicist and politician who was permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences. On 7 January 1839 Arago announced the invention to the Academy, describing the images without revealing how they were made.

Arago persuaded the government to buy the process for the nation. A law passed in the summer of 1839 granted Daguerre a life pension of 6,000 francs a year and Isidore Niépce 4,000 francs. On 19 August 1839, at a joint meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts, Arago explained the full method to a packed audience. Daguerre’s illustrated manual went through dozens of editions in several languages within a few years, and the instrument maker Alphonse Giroux sold the first official cameras.

The gift had one important exception. Days before the announcement, Daguerre’s agent obtained a patent for England and Wales, so British photographers had to pay a licence fee. This helps explain why the daguerreotype spread more slowly in Britain than in France or the United States.

Rivals: Talbot and Bayard

The news from Paris startled other experimenters. In England William Henry Fox Talbot hurried to show his “photogenic drawings” at the Royal Institution in late January 1839 and described his method to the Royal Society. His paper-based process, improved into the calotype in 1840–1841, produced a negative from which many prints could be made, the basis of most photography until the digital age. In Paris, Hippolyte Bayard devised a direct-positive paper process in 1839 and later protested at his neglect with a staged photograph of himself as a drowned man.

The portrait craze

Early exposures were too long for portraits, but faster lenses and more sensitive plates soon brought them down to well under a minute. In 1839 Robert Cornelius in Philadelphia made one of the earliest surviving photographic self-portraits. Commercial portrait studios opened in New York in 1840 and in London in 1841, where Richard Beard held the patent licence.

The daguerreotype became especially popular in the United States, which had perhaps thousands of operators by the early 1850s and produced millions of plates. Samuel Morse, the painter and telegraph pioneer, had met Daguerre in Paris in March 1839 and helped introduce the process to America. For the first time, ordinary families could own exact likenesses of their members, and portraits of famous people circulated widely.

From the mid-1850s the daguerreotype was replaced by cheaper processes on glass and paper that used Frederick Scott Archer’s wet collodion method of 1851, including the ambrotype and the tintype.

Myths and facts

Myth: Daguerre invented photography alone. Daguerre built directly on Niépce’s earlier work, and Talbot, Bayard and others developed different photographic processes at the same time. The daguerreotype was the first process to be made practical and widely public, not the only route to photography.

Myth: sitters had to hold still for many minutes. This was true of the very first plates, but by the early 1840s better lenses and faster chemistry had reduced portrait exposures to seconds or tens of seconds in a well-lit studio. Head clamps hidden behind the sitter helped people keep still.

Fact: early street scenes look empty. On long exposures, moving people, horses and carriages left no trace. That is why the Boulevard du Temple appears deserted except for the man having his boots polished, who stood in one place long enough to be recorded.

Legacy

The daguerreotype lasted less than twenty years as a mainstream process, but it established photography as a profession and an industry, created the first large archive of photographic portraits and introduced a new idea of visual evidence. Scientists used it to record the Moon, the Sun and microscopic objects, and travellers brought back daguerreotypes of distant monuments.

Within two decades photographers using newer glass-plate methods were recording conflicts such as the Crimean War, and photography had become part of how the public understood events. Surviving daguerreotypes, preserved in museums such as the Musée d’Orsay and the Library of Congress, remain among the sharpest images of the early Victorian age.

Timeline

• c. 1826–1827: Niépce makes the earliest surviving camera photograph.
• 1829, 14 December: Niépce and Daguerre sign their partnership agreement.
• 1833, 5 July: Niépce dies; Daguerre continues with Isidore Niépce.
• 1838: Daguerre photographs the Boulevard du Temple in Paris.
• 1839, 7 January: Arago announces the daguerreotype to the Academy of Sciences.
• 1839, 25 January: Talbot shows his photogenic drawings in London.
• 1839, 19 August: The process is made public in Paris.
• 1840, March: One of the first commercial portrait studios opens in New York.
• 1851: Archer publishes the wet collodion process, which later displaces the daguerreotype.

Why it matters

The daguerreotype made photography a practical, public technology. By publishing it openly, France ensured that the ability to record reality with light spread quickly around the world, changing portraiture, science, travel and news, and starting a visual record of human life that has continued ever since.