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first permanent photo etching was an image produced in 1822 by
the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce, but it was destroyed in a
later attempt to make prints from it. Niépce was successful
again in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he made the View from the Window
at Le Gras, the earliest surviving photograph from nature (i.e.,
of the image of a real-world scene, as formed in a camera
obscura by a lens). View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826 or
1827, the earliest surviving camera photograph
Because Niépce's camera photographs required an extremely long
exposure (at least eight hours and probably several days), he
sought to greatly improve his bitumen process or replace it with
one that was more practical. In partnership with Louis Daguerre,
he worked out post-exposure processing methods that produced
visually superior results and replaced the bitumen with a more
light-sensitive resin, but hours of exposure in the camera were
still required. With an eye to eventual commercial exploitation,
the partners opted for total secrecy.
Niépce died in 1833 and Daguerre then redirected the experiments
toward the light-sensitive silver halides, which Niépce had
abandoned many years earlier because of his inability to make
the images he captured with them light-fast and permanent.
Daguerre's efforts culminated in what would later be named the
daguerreotype process. The essential elements—a silver-plated
surface sensitized by iodine vapor, developed by mercury vapor,
and "fixed" with hot saturated salt water—were in place in 1837.
The required exposure time was measured in minutes instead of
hours. Daguerre took the earliest confirmed photograph of a
person in 1838 while capturing a view of a Paris street: unlike
the other pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on the busy
boulevard, which appears deserted, one man having his boots
polished stood sufficiently still throughout the
several-minutes-long exposure to be visible.
he existence of Daguerre's process was publicly announced,
without details, on 7 January 1839. The news created an
international sensation. France soon agreed to pay Daguerre a
pension in exchange for the right to present his invention to
the world as the gift of France, which occurred when complete
working instructions were unveiled on 19 August 1839. In that
same year, American photographer Robert Cornelius is credited
with taking the earliest surviving photographic self-portrait.
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