Daguerre's Photographic Process Announced
- Date
- 1839
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- France (Paris)
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
On 7 January 1839 the painter and stage designer Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre presented his photographic process to the French Academie des Sciences, and on 19 August 1839 the details were publicly disclosed in Paris.
The daguerreotype produced sharp, finely detailed images on silver-coated copper plates with exposures of roughly twenty to thirty minutes, a dramatic improvement over the eight-hour exposure of Nicephore Niepce's earlier heliograph of 1826-27. Crucially, the French government purchased the rights and declared the invention a gift to the world, free for anyone to use, which accelerated its spread across Europe, the Americas, and beyond. Photography transformed portraiture, journalism, science, and historical memory, giving ordinary people access to lifelike images and providing documentary records of people, places, and events for the first time. The daguerreotype dominated photography through the 1840s and 1850s before being displaced by negative-positive processes that allowed multiple prints. Daguerre's announcement is conventionally taken as the birth of practical photography and the visual culture of the modern age.
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Empires active in 1839
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
Related science, technology & invention events
- Pasteur's rabies vaccine saves Joseph Meister6 July 1885
- Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction29 August 1831
- Opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway27 September 1825
- Third Plague Pandemic begins in Yunnan1855 (origin in Yunnan); global spread from 1894
- Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species24 November 1859
- Maxwell formulates the theory of electromagnetism1865–1873
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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