Louis Daguerre

Today is the birthday of photography pioneer Louis Daguerre, who was born in Cormeilles, France, in 1787. He was a skilled painter who developed diorama theater. In 1829 Daguerre began collaborating with inventor Nicéphore Niépce, who had produced rudimentary photographs but required a complicated eight-hour process to do so. Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre pressed on. By the late 1830s he had perfected a technique in which an image is exposed onto a silver-plated sheet ofcopper inside a large camera, followed up with mercury fumes to develop the image and salt water to fix it to the sheet. The process took 20 to 30 minutes. Daguerre not-so-humbly called his photographs “daguerreotypes,” which he presented in January 1839 to the French Academy of Sciences. Daguerre used his invention for artistic purposes as well as scientific, awing a French journalist with a daguerreotype of a dead spider seen through a microscope. Thankfully, no mercury is used in modern photography.

Date in History: 18 November 1787