Submitted by Al …
(Adapted from The Encyclopedia of Photography ©1963)
Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype process, was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, France, on November 18, 1787. He became, by profession, a painter, specializing in scenic design.
At sixteen he was apprenticed to Ignace Eugene Marie Degotti, famous for painting stage sets for the Paris Opera. When he left his master, he met with immediate success on his own. More than one popular play became memorable for Daguerre’s decor alone. Critics even suggested that he should take the bows before the actors and the author.
In 1822, he formed a partnership with Charles Marie Bouton, a painter who specialized in creating the panoramic murals of cities, battlefields, and historic events which were at the time so popular in all the capitals of the western world. The two young men dreamed of something that would go beyond both the stage and the panorama. “A way should be found,” they wrote, “of imitating aspects of nature as we see them, that is to say, with all the changes brought by time, wind, light, atmosphere.” They built a theater in Paris which they called ‘The Diorama’, in which they showed paintings 71½ x 45½ feet in size. They painted these immense pictures on both sides of translucent linen. When illuminated by the top light, the picture on the front of the canvas was visible. When illuminated from the rear, the picture on the back became visible. In this way Daguerre and Bouton were able to produce startling effects – a building before and after its destruction by fire, an Alpine village laid flat by an avalanche. These highly illusionistic paintings required exact perspective, and Daguerre, like many other painters, used a camera obscura to help him solve difficult problems of foreshortening and the recession of planes in depth.
Around 1824 Daguerre conceived the idea of reproducing the camera image directly by chemical means, rather than tracing the image on translucent paper. When he learned that another Frenchman, Joseph Nicephore Niepce was working toward the same goal, he began a long correspondence which resulted in the formation of a partnership in 1829.
Niepce had begun work in 1816 and had succeeded in recording the camera image by a silver chloride technique. He was dismayed that the lights and shadows were shown in the reverse order. What was light came out dark, and vice versa. Not realizing that from this negative he could make positives, he abandoned this technique and began to search for a way to produce direct positives. By the time he joined Daguerre, he was working with metal plates. In 1824 he had made a picture of the farm court of his house in Chalon-sur-Saone. The exposure was more than 8 hours, so long that the sun, moving in its course, destroyed the shadows. He sought a method of reducing the exposure time. He needed better lenses. These Daguerre possessed, and this led Niepce to agree to the partnership.It lasted only four years, terminating with the death of Niepce in 1833, leaving his son Isidore to take his place.
Isidore was not skilled in his father’s technique and was unable to contribute to its development. Daguerre continued alone, and by 1837 his technique had reached the point where he could make a highly detailed still life in his studio. Reluctantly, Isidore signed a new contract with Daguerre, which stipulated that “the new process shall bear the name of Daguerre alone; it may, however, only be published simultaneously with the first process, in order that the name of M. Joseph Nicephore Niepce may always figure, as it should, in this invention.”
Daguerre planned to sell, by public subscription, the rights to what he now named the daguerreotype, and had already printed an announcement when Francois Arago, a noted scientist and perpetual secretary of the official Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Chamber of Deputies, proposed that the invention be purchased outright by the government, and presented as a free gift to the world. Arago described the process to his colleagues in a general way at the January 7, 1839 meeting of the Academy. He drafted a bill, stipulating that Daguerre and Isidore Niepce were to be given lifetime
pensions in return for the publication of Daguerre’s still secret process of daguerreotype and also dioramic painting. Both houses of government passed the bill, and it was signed by King Louis Phillipe. The inventions were publicly disclosed on August 19, 1839.
Daguerre, Isidore Niepce, and Arago faced a packed house at the Institut de France. To the disappointment of the audience, Arago alone spoke, and did not demonstrate the process, but merely described it verbally.
Daguerre published a booklet on the following day, History and Description of the Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama, containing specific instructions and scale drawings of the camera and the processing equipment. Beginning September 7, 1839, he gave a series of public demonstrations at the Ministry of the Interior and the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers.
The demand for daguerreotype equipment was enormous. A camera was designed by Daguerre and made by his brother-in-law Alphonse Giroux. Giroux got half the profit while Daguerre and Niepce got 25% each. The great optician Chevalier expressed his disappointment when he was not asked to make Daguerre’s camera - “An optician was needed, a stationer was chosen”. His disappointment was somewhat abated when he was allowed to make the optics. The lenses were slow, and with the relatively insensitive plates the exposure time was about 10 to 20 minutes.
Its genuineness is confirmed by the plaque at the side of the camera. There are Daguerre’s signature, Giroux’ seal and the year 1839. This camera is the first commercially manufactured model and is from a photo-historical point of view a most important camera.
The text on the plaque is:
”Aucun Appareil n’est garanti s’il ne porte la Sign.. de Mr. Daguerre et le Cachet de Mr. Giroux. Le DAGUERREOTYPE, exécute’ sous la Direction de son Auteur, à Paris, chez Alph.Giroux et Cie., Rue du Coq. St Honore’ No7”.
English Translation “The warranty of the apparatus is not valid if it does not carry Mr Daguerre’s signature and Mr Giroux’ seal. The DAGUERREOTYPE Made under supervision by its originator by Alph. Giroux and Company, Rue du Coq. St Honore’ No 7 in Paris”
Text on the seal: DAGUERREOTYPE 1839 Alph. Giroux.”
In a few months Daguerre and Giroux sold all the cameras that they had made. Many instrument makers copied the camera. If you could not afford a camera you purchased Giroux’ description, which was soon published in 32 different editions in many languages. The whole outfit including camera, box for polished plates, box for iodising, mercury box, spirit lamp, buff stick and various chemicals weighed about 50kg.
To make a daguerreotype, Daguerre first polished the silver side of a silver plated copper plate until it was mirror bright. He then laid it silver side down over a box containing a few particles of iodine. In a few minutes the iodine formed light sensitive silver iodide upon the polished plate. He then put the plate in a holder which he fastened to the back of a camera. He swung open the two doors inside the camera by the means of brass levers, removed the lens cap, and exposed the plate for several minutes. (Of the recorded data, the shortest exposure was three minutes, the longest was 45.) Daguerre developed the plate by putting it over mercury heated to 145°F. He then washed it with ‘hypo’ (sodium thiosulfate, then called sodium hyposulfite) to remove the unexposed silver iodide, rinsed in distilled water, and dried it over an alcohol lamp.
In 1840 Daguerre retired to the village of Bry-Sur-Marne. By then daguerreotypes were being made all over the world, and already the original technique was being improved by others.
The exposure time was brought down to seconds by hypersensitizing the iodized plate with the fumes of bromide and chlorine, alone or in combination, an invention first disclosed by John Frederick Goddard of London. The tones of the processed plate were enriched by gold toning, the invention of Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau.
Daguerre’s contract with the government specified that he was “to publish any improvements which he may make from time to time in each and all of these inventions.” In 1841 Arago announced that Daguerre had succeeded in so increasing the sensitivity of his plates that instantaneous exposures could be made. But when the Minister of the Interior asked Daguerre to report to him, Daguerre declined, pleading indisposition, and stated in an autographed letter now in the George Eastman House, that ‘the details of it have not yet been sufficiently worked out for me to be able to make it public.” Although Daguerre wrote Robert Hunt, author of the first English photographic manual, that “by means of the new process it shall be possible to fix the image of objects in motion, such as public ceremonies, market places covered with people, battles, etc.”, nothing came of it.
Arago published specifications of the new process in the Comptes Rendus of the Academy of Sciences, its official journal. But it would not work, and Arago was obliged to apologize for the error in publication. Again in 1844 Daguerre announced an improved process, and published a booklet, New Method of Preparing the Sensitive Coating of Plates Intended to Receive Photographic Images. But the process was so vastly more complicated than techniques in common use all over the world that it was ignored.
Daguerre made no further photographic contributions. Once again he took up the brush in 1842 and painted a mural behind the altar of the village church, representing with astonishing illusionism a vast apse. He died in the village of his retirement, Bry-sur-Marne, on July 10, 1851.
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