13/10/2025
The History of
It began with the discovery of two fundamental principles:
The first is the projection of images with dark camera, the second is the discovery that some substances are visibly altered with exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light-sensitive materials before the 18th century.
View from the window of Le Gras 1826 or 1827, believed to be the oldest preserved camera photograph. Original (left) and colorized reorientation enhancement (right).
Around 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze used a light-sensitive suspension to capture images of cut letters in a bottle. However, he didn't try to make these results permanent. Around 1800, Thomas Wedgwood made the first reliably, albeit unsuccessful, documented attempt to capture permanent camera images. Their experiments resulted in detailed photographs, but Wedgwood and his partner Humphry Davy couldn't find a way to fix these images. In 1826, Nicéphore Niépce was the first to fix an image captured with a camera, but it took at least eight hours or even several days of exposure to the camera and the first results were very rudimental. Niépce's collaborator, Louis Daguerre, developed the Daguerotype process, the first commercially viable and publicly announced photographic process. The daguerrotype required only a few minutes of exposure in the camera and produced clear results with great detail. On August 2, 1839, Daguerre demonstrated the details of the process in the Chamber of Lords of Paris. On August 19, technical details were made public at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts at the Institute Palace. (For granting the rights of inventions to the public, Daguerre and Niépce received generous annuity for life. When the proc
