Louis Daguerre

(click to enlarge)
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, lithograph. (credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

(born Nov. 18, 1787, Cormeilles, France — died July 10, 1851, Bry-sur-Marne) French inventor. Initially a scene painter for the opera, in 1822 he opened the Diorama, an exhibition of views with effects induced by changes in lighting. In 1826 Nicéphore Niépce learned of Daguerre's experiments in obtaining permanent pictures by the action of sunlight, and the two became partners in the development of Niépce's heliographic process until Niépce's death in 1833. Continuing to experiment, Daguerre discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera creates a lasting image if the latent image on the plate is developed and fixed. In 1839 a description of his daguerreotype process was announced at the Academy of Sciences.

For more information on Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, visit Britannica.com.

French physicist, inventor, and painter (1789–1851)

Born in Cormeilles near Paris, France, Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype (the first practical photograph), first became interested in the effect of light on films from the artistic point of view. After working first as a tax officer he became a painter of opera scenery. Working with Charles-Marie Bouton he invented the diorama – a display of paintings on semitransparent linen that transmitted and reflected light – and opened a diorama in Paris (1822).

From 1826 Daguerre turned his attention to heliography and he was partnered in this by Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce until Niepce's death in 1833. Daguerre continued his work and in 1839 presented to the French Academy of Sciences the daguerreotype, which needed only about 25-minutes exposure time to produce an image, compared with over eight hours for Niepce's previous attempts. In the daguerreotype a photographic image was obtained on a copper plate coated with a light-sensitive layer of silver iodide and bromide.

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851), a French painter and stage designer, invented the daguerreotype, the first practical and commercially successful photographic process.

Louis Daguerre was born on Nov. 18, 1787, at Cormeilles-en-Parisis. Abandoning his architectural training in 1804, he turned to scene painting and became a pupil of I. E. M. Degotti at the Paris Opéra. In 1822 Daguerre and Charles Bouton developed the diorama, a large-scale peep show in which a painting on a large translucent screen was seemingly animated by the skillful play of light on each side. Daguerre made dioramas for 17 years.

Daguerre used the camera obscura to make sketches for his stage designs and, like so many others, wished to avoid the tedious tracing and fix the image chemically. After several unsuccessful efforts he learned in 1826 that J. N. Niépce was working toward the same end and had made some progress. A cautious correspondence followed, in which Niépce revealed his heliograph process, and in 1829 Daguerre and Niépce formed a partnership to develop the method.

Heliography depended on the hardening action of sunlight on bitumen and the subsequent dissolution of the soft shadow parts of the image. Using this method on a glass plate, Niépce had obtained and fixed a photograph from the camera obscura in 1826. But his aspirations went beyond a visible image to a photoengraved plate from which he could pull prints. This goal led to his using bitumen on silver-coated copperplates and then iodizing the silver revealed after dissolving the unexposed bitumen. The removal of the hardened bitumen produced a silver-silver iodide image. But Niépce went no further.

Building on his partner's foundation, Daguerre discovered the light sensitivity of silver iodide in 1831 but was unable to obtain a visible image. His discovery in 1835 that the latent image present on a silver iodide plate exposed for so short a time as 20 minutes could be developed with mercury vapor marked a major advance. Fixing was achieved in 1837, when he removed the unreduced silver iodide with a solution of common salt. Having improved Niépce's process beyond recognition, Daguerre felt justified in calling it the daguerreotype. He ceded the process to the French government. He revealed his discovery on Aug. 19, 1839.

Daguerre retired to Bry-sur-Marne in 1840 and died there on July 10, 1851. He had little more to do with the daguerreotype, leaving its improvement to others. It was perhaps the invention which most caught popular fancy in the mid-19th century, but it proved to be a blind alley in the development of modern photography.

Further Reading

Daguerre's life is fully documented in Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (1956). Their The History of Photography (1955) is an excellent overall discussion of photography.

Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé (1787-1851), French artist and inventor of the daguerreotype, born at Cormeilles-en-Parisis. Showing an early aptitude as an artist, he was apprenticed in 1800 to an architect, and c.1803 became a pupil of Degotti, the noted scene painter for the Paris Opera. In 1807 he began working under Pierre Prévost on panorama paintings. These enormous canvases were highly realistic depictions of cities and historical scenes. Their manner of display, in rotundas lit from above, added to their illusion of reality and may have inspired Daguerre and Charles Bouton, another of Prévost's assistants, to launch their own venture, the diorama. Combining the scale of the panorama with the diaphanorama, another invention that used paintings on paper, oiled for translucency, and alternately lit from either side to create subtle changes in the views, Daguerre and Bouton created a wholly novel form of highly realistic public entertainment. It opened in Paris in 1822 and was so successful that another was built in London.

Daguerre is best remembered for the photographic process that bears his name. Although he was credited in many early texts with the single-handed invention of photography, current scholarship indicates that Daguerre received more than his share of credit. He worked in partnership with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce from 1829 until Niépce's untimely death in 1833, and much of the preliminary work leading to a photographic process can be credited to Niépce and this partnership. Daguerre's greatest contribution to photographic science was his discovery of the latent image, without which a commercially viable process would not have been possible. This discovery was for many years linked primarily to Henry Talbot's calotype process, but was pre-dated by the daguerreotype. His experiments finished by late 1837, Daguerre tried in 1838 to sell the process by public subscription. This having failed, he approached François Arago, director of the Paris Observatory, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and also a member of the Chamber of Deputies. Arago, impressed with Daguerre's discovery, brought an article before the Chamber arguing that, as this great discovery for science and the arts could not be patented, the French government should honour Daguerre and purchase from him the secrets of the process and give them free to the world. A preliminary announcement of the discovery was made on 7 January 1839. In July 1839 the government awarded Daguerre an annuity of 6, 000 francs for life and to Isidore Niépce (1805-68), son of Daguerre's late partner, 4, 000 francs annually. Full details of the process were revealed on 19 August 1839. On the 14th, however, without the knowledge of the French government, Daguerre had patented the process in England, somewhat hampering the adoption of the daguerreotype there.

About fifteen daguerreotypes made by Daguerre in 1839 survive, including still lifes of statuettes, shells, and fossils, and some fine views of Paris. He announced new developments in the process in 1840 and 1841, but details never materialized. By late 1840 improvements by others in Europe and America brought it to the stage at which it is best known.

Daguerre died at his home in Bry-sur-Marne the same year that Frederick Scott Archer introduced his wet-plate process, which within less than a decade had superseded the daguerreotype.

— Roger Watson

Bibliography

• Gernsheim, H. and A., L.J.M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (1968).
• Wilder, K., “‘Ingenuity Wonder and Profit: Language and the Invention of Photography’” (Oxford D.Phil. dissertation, 2003).
• Bajac, Q., and Font-Réaulx, D. de (eds.), Le Daguerréotype français: un objet photographique (2003)

Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé (1787-1851). Inventor of a ‘diorama’, a popular attraction creating illusions of nature, and (with Nicéphore Niépce) of the daguerreotype, one of the earliest photographic processes, whose existence was officially announced in 1839.

Biography

"Daguerre" redirects here. For the lunar crater, see Daguerre (crater).

Louis Daguerre
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
Born	November 18, 1787 (1787-11-18) Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France
Died	July 10, 1851 (1851-07-11) Bry-sur-Marne, France

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (November 18, 1787 – July 10, 1851) was a French artist and chemist, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Competition with Talbot 3 Development of the Daguerreotype 4 Popular Culture 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Biography

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

In 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the world's first permanent photograph (known as a Heliograph). Daguerre partnered with Niépce two years later, beginning a four-year cooperation. Niépce died suddenly in 1833. The main reason for the "partnership", as far as Daguerre was concerned, was connected to his already famous dioramas. Niepce was a printer and his process was based on a faster way to produce printing plates. Daguerre thought that the process developed by Niepce could help speed up his diorama creation.

Daguerre announced the latest perfection of the Daguerreotype, after years of experimentation, in 1839, with the French Academy of Sciences announcing the process on January 7 of that year. Daguerre's patent was acquired by the French Government, and, on August 19, 1839, the French Government announced the invention was a gift "Free to the World."

Daguerre and Niépce's son obtained a pension from the Government in exchange for freely sharing the details of the process. Daguerre died in Bry-sur-Marne, 12 km (7 mi) from Paris. A monument marks his grave there.

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre.

Competition with Talbot

The work on the Daguerre process was taking place at the same time as that of William Fox Talbot in England on the calotype process. Both men knew that they were working on a process that would revolutionize the art world. The Grand Tours which were so popular were illustrated by drawings of scenes and the "photographic" process would improve the quality and ease with which these popular holiday memories could be produced.

To protect his own invention, Daguerre himself registered the patent for Britain on August 12 (a week before France declared it "Free to the World"), and this greatly slowed the development of photography in that nation. Great Britain was to be the only place the patent was enforced. Antoine Claudet was one of the few people legally able to take daguerreotypes there.

Daguerre did not need to make money from the invention to live, since he had been pensioned by the French government.^[1] Fox Talbot spent a considerable amount of money on his process (est. £5,000 in 1830s money) and licensed the process to British photographers where it was used instead of the Daguerreotype.

Development of the Daguerreotype

Main article: Daguerreotype

"Boulevard du Temple", taken by Daguerre in late 1838 or early 1839 in Paris, was the first photograph of a person. The image shows a street, but because exposure time was over ten minutes, the traffic was moving too much to appear. The exception is the man at the bottom left, who stood still getting his boots polished long enough to show. (click photo to enlarge)

The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, building on a discovery by Johann Heinrich Schultz (1724): a silver and chalk mixture darkens under exposure to light. Niépce and Daguerre refined this process. Daguerre first exposed silver-coated copper plates to iodine, obtaining silver iodide. Then he exposed them to light for several minutes. Then he coated the plate with mercury vapor heated to 75° Celsius, to amalgamate the mercury with the silver, finally fixing the image in salt water. These ideas led to the famous Daguerreotype.

The resultant plate produced an exact reproduction of the scene. The image was laterally reversed -- as images in mirrors are -- unless a second mirror was used during exposure to flip the image. The image could only be viewed at an angle and needed protection from the air and fingerprints so was encased in a glass-fronted box.

Some ambrotypes were passed off as Daguerreotypes by being placed in these type of boxes. But the process was cheaper involving a weakly-developed glass card or paper to appear as a positive. Tintypes also were "boxed" as Daguerrotypes.

Daguerreotypes were usually portraits; the rarer views are much sought-after and are more expensive. The portrait process took several minutes and required the subjects to remain stock still. Samuel Morse was astonished to learn that Daguerrotypes of streets of Paris did not show any humans, until he realized that due to the long exposure times all moving objects became invisible. The time was later reduced with the "faster" lenses such as the Petzval's portrait lens, the first mathematically calculated lens.

The Daguerreotype was the Polaroid of the day, producing a single image which was not reproducible (unlike the Talbot process). Despite this drawback, millions of Daguerreotypes were produced. By 1851, the year of Daguerre's death, the Fox Talbot negative process was refined by the development of the wet collodion process, whereby a glass negative enabled a limitless number of sharp prints to be made. These developments made the Daguerreotype redundant and the process very soon disappeared.

Popular Culture

Louis J. M. Daguerre is mentioned in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V.

See also

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

References

1. ^ 'A State Pension for L. J. M. Daguerre for the secret of his Daguerreotype technique' by R. Derek Wood, Annals of Science, 1997, Vol 54, pp. 489-506), www.midley.co.uk/Pension/Pension.htm

• 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.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Louis Daguerre

• Daguerre (1787–1851) and the Invention of Photography from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• 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 Memorial in Washington D.C.
• Louis Daguerre Encyclopedia Britannica
• Louis Daguerre's "Ruined Gothic Colonnade"
• the small lunar crater named after Louis Daguerre

Persondata
NAME	Daguerre, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé
SHORT DESCRIPTION	French artist and chemist, inventor of daguerrotype process of photography
DATE OF BIRTH	November 18, 1787
PLACE OF BIRTH	Cormeilles-en-Parisis, France
DATE OF DEATH	July 10, 1851
PLACE OF DEATH	Bry-sur-Marne, France

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