Louis Daguerre

Louis Daguerre
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
Born	18 November 1787 (1787-11-18) Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France
Died	10 July 1851(1851-07-10) (aged 63) Bry-sur-Marne, France
Known for	Invention of the daguerreotype process
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Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (18 November 1787 – 10 July 1851) was a French artist and physicist, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography.

Biography

Daguerre was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France. He apprenticed in architecture, theatre design, and panoramic painting with Pierre Prévost, the first French panorama painter. Exceedingly adept at his skill of theatrical illusion, he became a celebrated designer for the theatre and later came to invent the Diorama, which opened in Paris in July 1822.

In 1829, Daguerre partnered with Nicéphore Niépce, an inventor who had produced the world's first heliograph in 1822 and the first permanent camera photograph four years later. Niépce died suddenly in 1833, but Daguerre continued experimenting and evolved the process which would subsequently be known as the Daguerreotype. After efforts to interest private investors proved fruitless, Daguerre went public with his invention in 1839. At a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences on 7 January of that year, the invention was announced and described in general terms, but all specific details were withheld. Under assurances of strict confidentiality, Daguerre explained and demonstrated the process only to the Academy's perpetual secretary François Arago, who proved to be an invaluable advocate. Members of the Academy and other select individuals were allowed to examine specimens at Daguerre's studio. The images were enthusiastically praised as nearly miraculous and news of the Daguerreotype quickly spread. Arrangements were made for Daguerre's rights to be acquired by the French Government in exchange for lifetime pensions for himself and Niépce's son Isidore; then, on 19 August 1839, the French Government presented the invention as a gift from France "free to the world" and complete working instructions were published.

Daguerre died on 10 July 1851 of a heart attack in Bry-sur-Marne, 12 km (7 mi) from Paris. A monument marks his grave there.

Daguerre's name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel tower.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre

Development of the Daguerreotype

"Boulevard du Temple", taken by Daguerre in 1838 in Paris, includes the earliest known photograph of a person. The image shows a street, but because of the over ten minute exposure time the moving traffic does not appear. At the lower left, however, a man apparently having his boots polished, and the bootblack polishing them, were motionless enough for their images to be captured.

An engraving of Daguerre during his career

In 1826, prior to his association with Daguerre, Niépce used a coating of bitumen to make the first permanent camera photograph. The bitumen was hardened where it was exposed to light and the unhardened portion was then removed with a solvent. A camera exposure lasting for hours or days was required. Niépce and Daguerre later refined this process, but unacceptably long exposures were still needed.

After the death of Niépce in 1833, Daguerre concentrated his attention on the light-sensitive properties of silver salts, which had previously been demonstrated by Johann Heinrich Schultz and others. For the process which was eventually named the Daguerreotype, he exposed a thin silver-plated copper sheet to the vapor given off by iodine crystals, producing a coating of light-sensitive silver iodide on the surface. The plate was then exposed in the camera. Initially, this process, too, required a very long exposure to produce a distinct image, but Daguerre made the crucial discovery that an invisibly faint "latent" image created by a much shorter exposure could be chemically "developed" into a visible image. The latent image on a Daguerreotype plate was developed by subjecting it to the vapor given off by mercury heated to 75° Celsius. The resulting visible image was then "fixed" (made insensitive to further exposure to light) by removing the unaffected silver iodide with concentrated and heated salt water. Later, a solution of the more effective "hypo" (hyposulphite of soda, now known as sodium thiosulfate) was used instead.

The resultant plate produced an exact reproduction of the scene. The image was laterally reversed -- as images in mirrors are -- unless a mirror or inverting prism was used during exposure to flip the image. To be seen optimally, the image had to be lit at a certain angle and viewed so that the smooth parts of its mirror-like surface, which represented the darkest parts of the image, reflected something dark or dimly lit. The surface was subject to tarnishing by prolonged exposure to the air and was so soft that it could be marred by the slightest friction, so a Daguerreotype was almost always sealed under glass before being framed (as was commonly done in France) or mounted in a small folding case (as was normal in the UK and US).

Daguerreotypes were usually portraits; the rarer landscape views and other unusual subjects are now much sought-after by collectors and sell for much higher prices than ordinary portraits. At the time of its introduction, the process required exposures lasting ten minutes or more for brightly sunlit subjects, so portraiture was an impractical ordeal. Samuel Morse was astonished to learn that Daguerreotypes of the streets of Paris did not show any people, horses or vehicles, until he realized that due to the long exposure times all moving objects became invisible. Within a few years, exposures had been reduced to as little as a few seconds by the use of additional sensitizing chemicals and "faster" lenses such as Petzval's portrait lens, the first mathematically calculated lens.

The Daguerreotype was the Polaroid film of its day: it produced a unique image which could only be duplicated by using a camera to photograph the original. Despite this drawback, millions of Daguerreotypes were produced. The paper-based calotype process, introduced by Henry Fox Talbot in 1841, allowed the production of an unlimited number of copies by simple contact printing, but it had its own shortcomings—the grain of the paper was obtrusively visible in the image and the extremely fine detail of which the Daguerreotype was capable was not possible. The introduction of the wet collodion process in the early 1850s provided the basis for a negative-positive print-making process not subject to these limitations, although it, like the Daguerreotype, was initially used to produce one-of-a-kind images—ambrotypes on glass and tintypes on black-lacquered iron sheets—rather than prints on paper. These new types of images were much less expensive than Daguerreotypes and they were easier to view. By 1860 few photographers were still using Daguerre's process.

The same small ornate cases commonly used to house Daguerreotypes were also used for images produced by the later and very different ambrotype and tintype processes, and the images originally in them were sometimes later discarded so that they could be used to display photographic paper prints. It is now a very common error for any image in such a case to be described as "a Daguerreotype". A true Daguerreotype is always an image on a highly polished silver surface, usually under protective glass. If it is viewed while a brightly lit sheet of white paper is held so as to be seen reflected in its mirror-like metal surface, the Daguerreotype image will appear as a relatively faint negative—its dark and light areas reversed—instead of a normal positive. Other types of photographic images are almost never on polished metal and do not exhibit this peculiar characteristic of appearing positive or negative depending on the lighting and reflections.

Competition with Talbot

Unbeknownst to either inventor, Daguerre's developmental work in the mid-1830s coincided with photographic experiments being conducted by Henry Fox Talbot in England. Talbot had succeeded in producing a "sensitive paper" impregnated with silver chloride and capturing small camera images on it in the summer of 1835. At least one of those images still survives. Talbot was unaware that Daguerre's late partner Niépce had obtained similar small camera images on sliver-chloride-coated paper nearly twenty years earlier. Niépce could find no way to keep them from darkening all over when exposed to light for viewing and had therefore turned away from silver salts to experiment with other substances such as bitumen. Talbot, a gifted amateur chemist, was able to chemically stabilize his images sufficiently to withstand subsequent inspection in daylight with only a very limited degree of discoloration.

When the first reports of the French Academy of Sciences announcement of Daguerre's invention reached Talbot, with no details about the exact nature of the images or the process itself, he assumed that methods similar to his own must have been used and promptly wrote an open letter to the Academy claiming priority of invention. Although it soon became apparent that Daguerre's process was very unlike his own, Talbot had been stimulated to resume his long-discontinued photographic experiments, which eventually resulted in the calotype process, introduced in 1841. Like a sensitized Daguerreotype plate, but unlike Talbot's earlier "sensitive paper", better known as "salted paper", the calotype paper had to be exposed in the camera only long enough to produce a very faint or completely invisible image which was then chemically developed to full visibility. The negative image that resulted was made insensitive to light by treatment with "hypo", dried, then used to make one or more positive prints on salted paper by contact printing in sunlight.

Daguerre's agent in England applied for a British patent just days before France declared the invention "free to the world". Great Britain was thereby uniquely denied France's free gift and became the only country where the payment of license fees was required. This had the effect of inhibiting the spread of the process there, to the eventual advantage of competing processes which were subsequently introduced. Antoine Claudet was one of the few people legally licensed to make Daguerreotypes in Britain. Daguerre's pension was relatively modest—barely enough to support a middle-class existence—and apparently this British "irregularity" was allowed to pass without adverse consequences or much comment outside of the UK.

By contrast, resentment and negative comments certainly resulted when the independently wealthy Talbot, who had spent a considerable amount of money in developing his calotype process (about £5,000, equivalent to £378,000 as of 2012), did not make a similar general gift of it to mankind, or at least to his own countrymen, but opted to emulate Daguerre's UK policy and require the purchase of licenses for its use. This inhibited the widespread adoption of the calotype process as an alternative to the Daguerreotype in the UK. Eventually, Talbot relented and required licenses only from professional photographers using the process for portraiture. Talbot also gained a reputation for litigiousness, suing several subsequent inventors whose processes he believed to infringe the broad claims made in some of his own British patents.

Selected works

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See also

• John Herschel
• Palladiotype
• Photographic processes
• Platinotype Company
• William Willis

References

• Carl Edwin Lindgren. Teaching Photography in the Indian School. Photo Trade Directory: 1991. India International Photographic Council. Edited: N. Sundarraj and K. Ponnuswamy. VII IIPC-SIPATA Intl. Workshop and Conference on Photography — Madras, p. 9.
• R. Colson (ed.), Mémoires originaux des créateurs de la photographie. Nicéphore Niepce, Daguerre, Bayard, Talbot, Niepce de Saint-Victor, Poitevin, Paris 1898
• Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre. The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, London 1956 (revised edition 1968)
• Beaumont Newhall, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama by Daguerre, New York 1971
• Hans Rooseboom, What’s wrong with Daguerre? Reconsidering old and new views on the invention of photography, Nescio, Amsterdam, 2010 (www.nescioprivatepress.blogspot.com)
• Daguerre, Louis (1839). History and Practice of the Photogenic Drawing on the True Principles of the Daguerreotype with the New Method of Dioramic Painting. London: Stewart and Murray. http://books.google.com/books?id=gnUEAAAAQAAJ&dq=A%20practical%20description%20of%20that%20process%20called%20the%20daguerreotype&pg=PP9#v=onepage&q&f=false. 

External links

• Daguerre (1787–1851) and the Invention of Photography from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Louis Daguerre and Bry-sur-Marne
• Louis Daguerre Biography
• Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) from World Wide Art Resources.
• Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mande by Robert Leggat.
• Daguerre and the daguerreotype An array of source texts from the Daguerreian Society web site
• Daguerre's Boulevard du Temple photograph - a discussion on its making and subsequent history.
• Daguerre Memorial in Washington D.C.
• Louis Daguerre Encyclopædia Britannica