Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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b. 18 November 1787 Carmeilles-en-Parisis, France

d. 10 July 1851 Petit-Bry-sur-Marne, France

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French inventor of the first practicable photographic process.

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The son of a minor official in a magistrate's court, Daguerre showed an early aptitude for drawing. He was first apprenticed to an architect, but in 1804 he moved to Paris to learn the art of stage design. He was particularly interested in perspective and lighting, and later showed great ingenuity in lighting stage sets. Fascinated by a popular form of entertainment of the period, the panorama, he went on to create a variant of it called the diorama. It is assumed that he used a camera obscura for perspective drawings and, by purchasing it from the optician Chevalier, he made contact with Joseph Nicéphore Niepce. In 1829 Niepce and Daguerre entered into a formal partnership to perfect Niepce's heliographic process, but the partnership was dissolved when Niepce died in 1833, when only limited progress had been made. Daguerre continued experimenting alone, however, using iodine and silver plates; by 1837 he had discovered that images formed in the camera obscura could be developed by mercury vapour and fixed with a hot salt solution. After unsuccessfully attempting to sell his process, Daguerre approached F.J.D. Arago, of the Académie des Sciences, who announced the discovery in 1839. Details of Daguerre's work were not published until August of that year when the process was presented free to the world, except England. With considerable business acumen, Daguerre had quietly patented the process through an agent, Miles Berry, in London a few days earlier. He also granted a monopoly to make and sell his camera to a Monsieur Giroux, a stationer by trade who happened to be a relation of Daguerre's wife. The daguerreotype process caused a sensation when announced. Daguerre was granted a pension by a grateful government and honours were showered upon him all over the world. It was a direct positive process on silvered copper plates and, in fact, proved to be a technological dead end. The future was to lie with negative-positive photography devised by Daguerre's British contemporary, W.H.F. Talbot, although Daguerre's was the first practicable photographic process to be announced. It captured the public's imagination and in an improved form was to dominate professional photographic practice for more than a decade.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Officier de la Légion d'honneur 1839. Honorary FRS 1839. Honorary Fellow of the National Academy of Design, New York, 1839. Honorary Fellow of the Vienna Academy 1843. Pour le Mérite, bestowed by Frederick William IV of Prussia, 1843.

Bibliography

14 August 1839, British patent no. 8,194 (daguerrotype photographic process).

The announcement and details of Daguerre's invention were published in both serious and popular English journals. See, for example, 1839 publications of Athenaeum, Literary Gazette, Magazine of Science and Mechanics Magazine.

Further Reading

H.Gernsheim and A.Gernsheim, 1956, L.J.M. Daguerre (the standard account of Daguerre's work).

—1969, The History of Photography, rev. edn, London (a very full account).

J.M.Eder, 1945, History of Photography, trans. E. Epstean, New York (a very full account).

JW