The camera obscura was used as an aid to artists for several centuries before Niépce started researching some way to permanently fix the images created by means of this device. He achieved results as early as May 1816, though the images (which he called retinas) eventually completely blackened and disappeared.
Continued experiments with solutions that light would bleach rather than darken led to Niépce's 1822 discovery of what we know today as the contact print, and from 1824 on he was able to actually fix images by using lithographic stones coated with Judea bitumen. This process, now known as heliography, would not actually be published until 1839 (when it would be overshadowed by another's improvements). This would come about through the fortuitous circumstance of Niépce encountering one Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre while traveling to England in December 1827.
Daguerre and Niépce struck up a convivial and productive relationship, and the two men created a partnership in 1829 to try and develop heliography further. This partnership led in 1832 to the discovery of the physautotype, which used the residue of lavender oil distillation to reduce exposure times from days to as little as eight hours (in the sun).
When Niépce died in 1833 he left his notes to Daguerre, who--despite having no scientific background-- made two additional discoveries that would be important to the history of photography. He discovered that by exposing silver to iodine vapor before exposing it to light, and then exposing this to mercury fumes after a photograph was taken, one could capture a latent image. By bathing a plate so exposed in a salt bath, this latent image could then be fixed.
But Daguerre was not the first to discover this process. In 1832 the French-Brazilian painter and inventor Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence, with the help of a pharmacist friend, Joaquim Correa de Mello, invented a process he called photographie which used silver nitrate on paper to fix images in a process similar to that discovered by Daguerre. Because of inadequate publicity, no doubt abetted by his being an otherwise obscure inventor in what was then a remote part of the world, Florence is rarely accorded the honors that other important figures in the development of photography receive:
On January 7, 1839, Daguerre presented his discoveries to the members of France's Académie des Sciences. The world would never be the same....
Recent Comments