Joseph Nicéphore Niepce

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French inventor (1765–1833)

Niepce, who made the first permanent photographic image, came from a wealthy family in Châlon-sur-Saône, eastern France, that fled the French Revolution. He returned to serve with Napoleon Bonaparte's army, but after being dismissed because of ill health, went back to his birthplace (1801) to do scientific research.

With his brother, Niepce built an internal-combustion engine (1807) for boats using carbon and resin for fuel. In 1813 he started the attempt to record images, on paper coated with silver chloride. He produced his first image, a view from his workroom, in 1816, but was only able to fix this partially with nitric acid. In 1822 he produced a photographic copy of an engraving using a glass plate coated with bitumen of Judea. Later (1826) he used a pewter plate to make the first permanent camera photograph. He also devised the first mechanical reproduction process. The main difficulty was the long exposure times needed – over eight hours. Niepce formed a partnership with the Parisian painter, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1826 to perfect the process of heliography but he died before seeing the final success of his efforts.

Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore (1765-1833), French photographic inventor. He was the son of a lawyer at Chalon-sur-Saône, Burgundy, and, apart from a period in the army, spent most of his inventing life at the family estate at Gras in Saint-Loup de Varennes. Baptized Joseph, he began to use the name Nicéphore in his early twenties, while enrolled at the Oratorian college in Angers, where he learned the science and experimental methods that enabled him to work on such diverse projects as the combustion engine, dyeing, and photography. In 1807, he and his brother Claude (1763-1828) obtained a patent for their pyréolophore, a boat engine driven by internal combustion.

Niépce began his photographic experimenting no later than the spring of 1816, half a year before his search for a native lithographic stone. This suggests that his photographic experiments led him to lithography, although his son Isidore (1805-68) suggested the opposite. In search of a satisfactory positive image he employed many substances, among them bitumen of Judea, lavender oil, gum guaiacum, and vapours of iodine, on supports of paper, stone, silver, and pewter. He succeeded with an impractical but functional process in the 1820s both in copying engravings and in capturing points de vue, direct positive images made with the camera obscura. In 1827, Niépce travelled to London via Paris, visiting the engraver Augustin Lemaître (1797-1870) and Louis Daguerre, the former already a colleague, and the latter soon to be his partner. Although Niépce attempted to interest King George IV, the Royal Academy, and the Royal Society in his héliographie, his inability to market the invention properly, internecine politics in the Royal Society, and the absence abroad of both Sir John Herschel and Henry Talbot at the time ensured his failure. He dejectedly returned home, leaving behind the picture known as View from the Study window (Point de vue du Gras à Saint-Loup de Varennes; 1827). In 1829, Niépce brought his experiments and chemical knowledge into a partnership with Daguerre that was, with Daguerre's recognition of the latent image, to lead directly to the invention of the daguerreotype.

— Kelley E. Wilder

Bibliography

• Marignier, J. L., Niépce: l'invention de la photographie (1999).
• Bajac, Q., The Invention of Photography, trans. R. Taylor (2002)