The Inventors of Photography

We can say that two men were responsible for the invention of photography: Nièpce and Daguerre. It was in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, that Nicéphore Nièpce (1765-1833) began researching a way to fix images obtained through the camera obscura. In one of his experiments, Nièpce uses a photosensitive layer of bitumen from Judea, on a plate exposed to the sun, thus obtaining his first results, called heliography (sun writing). It is estimated that the exhibition lasted around eight hours on a summer day, with a camera manufactured by the optics house of Vicent and Charles Chevalier. This process had the disadvantage of low speed and poor image quality.

In 1829, he teamed up with a Parisian theater decorator, Jacques Louis Mandè Daguerre (1787-1851), who sought to create images for his shows using the camera obscura.

Nièpce died in 1833 and, from his research, the invention of the first photographic procedure emerged in 1839: the daguerreotype. This procedure consists of applying an emulsion of silver salts to a polished copper plate, which is exposed to light inside the camera obscura. Afterwards, the plaque is revealed in mercury vapors. The technique allowed good quality images to be created, but it was not possible to reproduce them, as the negative was not yet available. With this technical sequence already developed, it was possible to capture, develop and fix traces of an image on a photosensitive surface. On July 3, 1839, the Daguerreotype was presented at the French Academy of Science and Fine Arts by astronomer and deputy François Arago so that its patent belonged to the French government. The Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers adopted by law the purchase of the patent for the invention of the daguerreotype.

Check out an excerpt from the speech given by Arago, member of the French chamber and deputies, in defense of daguerreotype, praising the mastery of new techniques, from astrophysics to philology.
The invention of the negative occurred in 1839 by Hippolyte Bayard, who created directly positive images on paper, but the quality was very poor and did not convince people. The Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) mixed silver nitrate with gallic acid on a sheet of paper and, in this way, obtained the first negative: the calotype, which, with the contact test, allows a series of positive images. Improvements in chemical art are accompanied by many others in the optical area and, thus, photography gains the public and followers of this new form of image reproduction. There is a boom in sales of daguerreotype machines, and landscape and portrait photography becomes popular. Over time, the process of obtaining images using daguerreotypes declines due to the emergence of new, more effective techniques. In 1851, Englishman Frederic Scott Archer developed the glass negative technique which, as it was transparent, allowed the enlargement of several copies of the image obtained. This reproducibility gives photography its media character, which would be the power that the photographic image has to reproduce information and reach a large number of people due to this technical reproducibility.

After Daguerre, with the discovery, at least officially, of photography and the negative by Talbot and the consequent possibility of reproducing the negative, other inventions were important to reduce the exposure time and improve the quality of the image, until reaching what we know analogue (film) photography. Are they:

     Niépce da Saint-Victor, in 1847, discovered that egg white or albumin was a suitable solution for silver iodide.
     Frederick Scott Archer, in 1851, developed the “wet collodion” process, a solution of pyroxylin in equal parts alcohol and ether in order to unite silver salts.
     Richards Leach Madox, in 1871, developed dry plates, an emulsion based on gelatin with silver bromide (1/25s of exposure, making the shutter a necessity).
     Herman Vogel, in 1873, created the first orthochromatic dry plate.
     Habbibal Goodwin, in 1888, invented nitrocellulose-based film, which replaced sensitive paper.
With the processes described above, the production of photographs was accessible to few people, those who had knowledge of physics and chemistry. However, in 1888, George Estman, a manufacturer of dry plates for photography, created the first portable camera, the Kodak number 1.

Kodak #1 sold for $25. It was a coffin-type camera, using sensitive paper film measuring 608 x 7 cm, enough to take 100 circular negatives measuring 3.8 cm in diameter. With this, anyone could take photographs, simply by pressing the shutter button, which would be similar to amateur digital cameras, resulting in the popularization of photography.