Precursors and the invention of photography

Photography was not invented in a single flash of genius. It came from the meeting of two much older ideas: the optical knowledge that light passing through a small opening forms an image, and the chemical knowledge that some substances change when light falls on them. For centuries these ideas existed separately. In the early nineteenth century, several people in different countries worked to bring them together, and in 1839 two very different processes were announced within weeks of each other. This lesson follows that story, the rivalries and priority disputes it produced, and the question of why photography appeared when it did.

The camera obscura

The camera obscura, Latin for "dark room", is the optical ancestor of every camera. When light from a bright scene passes through a small hole into a darkened space, it forms an inverted image on the opposite wall. Thinkers in ancient China and Greece described the effect, and the Arab scholar Ibn al-Haytham analyzed it carefully around the year 1000 in his work on optics. Renaissance writers recommended it for watching solar eclipses safely.

By the sixteenth century, makers had added lenses to brighten and sharpen the image, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries portable camera obscuras, boxes with a lens, a mirror and a sheet of ground glass, were common drawing aids. Artists traced the projected image to get perspective and proportions right. The debate about whether some painters, such as Vermeer, used optical aids continues, as VIS-130 discussed. What the camera obscura could not do was keep the image. When the light changed or the box moved, the picture vanished.

Light-sensitive chemistry

The second ingredient was chemistry. In 1727 the German scientist Johann Heinrich Schulze showed that silver salts darken because of light, not heat. Later experimenters, including the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, studied the effect further. Around 1800, Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy in England made images by placing objects on paper or leather coated with silver nitrate and exposing them to sunlight. They could produce silhouettes, but they could not stop the unexposed areas from darkening when the images were later viewed in light. The problem of fixing, making the image permanent, remained unsolved.

Niépce and the first camera photographs

The French inventor Nicéphore Niépce began experimenting in the 1810s. He coated plates with bitumen of Judea, a kind of asphalt that hardens in light. After a long exposure in a camera obscura, he washed the plate with solvents that dissolved the unhardened bitumen, leaving an image. He called his process heliography, "sun writing". A view from an upstairs window at his estate at Le Gras, made around 1826 or 1827, is usually described as the oldest surviving photograph made with a camera. Its exposure lasted many hours, perhaps days, so that sunlight appears to fall on both sides of the buildings. Niépce's process was too slow for practical use, but it proved that a camera image could be fixed.

Daguerre and the daguerreotype

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a painter and showman who ran the Diorama in Paris, a theater of huge translucent paintings transformed by changing light. He formed a partnership with Niépce in 1829. Niépce died in 1833, and Daguerre continued working, eventually discovering that a silver-coated copper plate sensitized with iodine vapor could record a hidden, latent image in minutes, which mercury vapor then developed. Common salt, and later sodium thiosulfate, fixed the image.

The French government bought the process and, on 19 August 1839, the scientist François Arago presented the details to a joint meeting of the Academies of Sciences and Fine Arts. France presented the daguerreotype as a gift to the world, free for anyone to use, although Daguerre had taken out a patent in England a few days earlier. The daguerreotype produced astonishingly detailed images, but each was a unique positive on a mirror-like plate that had to be tilted to be seen correctly. It could not be copied except by photographing it again.

Talbot and photogenic drawing

In England, William Henry Fox Talbot, a scientist and gentleman scholar, had been working on a paper-based process since 1834. Frustrated by his inability to draw scenes on holiday at Lake Como using a camera lucida, he wanted to make nature draw itself. He coated paper with salt and silver nitrate, made images of leaves and lace by contact, and small camera images of his home at Lacock Abbey. A small paper negative of a latticed window, made in 1835, is the oldest surviving photographic negative.

When news of Daguerre's announcement reached him in January 1839, Talbot hurried to present his own work to the Royal Institution and the Royal Society. His early "photogenic drawings" needed long exposures and faded easily. In 1840 he discovered that a latent image could be developed chemically, cutting exposure times dramatically, and in 1841 he patented this improved process as the calotype, from the Greek for "beautiful picture". The calotype produced a paper negative from which many positive prints could be made, the principle on which most photography would be based for the next 150 years.

Herschel, Bayard and other inventors

Talbot's friend Sir John Herschel, an astronomer and chemist, contributed crucial ideas. In 1819 he had discovered that sodium thiosulfate, then called hyposulphite of soda or "hypo", dissolves silver salts. In 1839 he showed that hypo fixed photographic images, and photographers have used it ever since. Herschel also coined or popularized the words "photography", "negative" and "positive" and later invented the cyanotype, a blueprint process using iron salts, in 1842.

Talbot and Daguerre were not alone. In France, Hippolyte Bayard developed a direct positive paper process and exhibited prints in June 1839, before Daguerre's public announcement. Officials encouraged him to delay, and he received little recognition. In protest he made a famous staged photograph in 1840 showing himself as a drowned man, with a text complaining that the government had ignored him, which is often described as the first staged or fictional photograph. In Brazil, the French-born artist Hercule Florence experimented with light-sensitive images in the 1830s and used the word "photographie" in his notes. These parallel inventions show that the idea was, as historians say, in the air.

Priority disputes and the politics of invention

Who invented photography? The answer depends on what you count. If the first permanent camera image counts, Niépce has a strong claim. If the first practical process announced to the public counts, Daguerre. If the negative-positive principle that dominated photography counts, Talbot. National pride shaped these claims. French histories emphasized Niépce and Daguerre, British histories Talbot, and many accounts ignored Bayard and Florence entirely.

Patents mattered too. Daguerre's process was free in France but patented in England, and Talbot's calotype patents in England were strict. Some historians argue that Talbot's patents slowed the spread of paper photography in Britain in the 1840s, while the free daguerreotype spread rapidly in France and the United States. Talbot eventually gave up most of his patent rights in the 1850s after legal challenges. The story is a reminder that inventions are shaped by law, money and politics as well as science.

Why 1839?

Why did photography appear in the 1830s rather than earlier? The optics and the basic chemistry had existed for decades. Historians point to several factors. Industrialization created a growing middle class that wanted affordable portraits and a culture fascinated by science and mechanical progress. Lithography and other printing techniques had already created appetite for images. Chemistry was advancing rapidly, and scientists corresponded across borders. Some historians, such as Geoffrey Batchen, have argued that the desire to fix the image, to capture nature without the hand of the artist, appeared among many people at once around 1800, which explains why so many independent inventors emerged.

The figures are approximate because early exposures varied greatly with weather, lens and plate preparation. Within a few years, faster lenses, such as the Petzval portrait lens of 1840, and chemical accelerators using bromine cut daguerreotype exposures to well under a minute, making studio portraiture possible.

The first reactions

The public response to photography in 1839 was a mixture of wonder and anxiety. Newspapers described "daguerreotypomania" as crowds bought cameras and chemicals. Scientists welcomed a tool that could record without bias, artists worried that their livelihoods were threatened, and critics argued over whether a mechanical process could ever be art. Edgar Allan Poe, writing in 1840, praised the daguerreotype as more truthful than any painting. The French poet Charles Baudelaire, writing in 1859, attacked photography as the refuge of failed painters and insisted it should remain a humble servant of science and art. These early arguments about truth, art and mechanism return again and again throughout this course.

The daguerreotype spread with remarkable speed in the United States. Within weeks of the 1839 announcement, Americans such as Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, and the chemist John William Draper were experimenting. In late 1839 Robert Cornelius in Philadelphia made one of the earliest surviving photographic self-portraits, and by the 1850s American cities had hundreds of daguerreotype studios.

Trying it yourself

You can experience the problems early inventors faced with simple, safe activities. Make a pinhole camera from a box and observe the inverted image on tracing paper. Make cyanotypes, Herschel's iron-based process, by placing leaves on pre-treated paper in sunlight and rinsing in water; kits are widely sold and avoid the toxic chemicals of early silver processes. Photograph a busy street with a very long exposure using a neutral density filter and notice how moving people vanish, as they did in the earliest daguerreotypes of Paris. PHOT-240 covers darkroom chemistry and safety in detail; never attempt the mercury development of real daguerreotypes, which is highly toxic.