How it began
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, born at Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy, produced legible but fleeting camera pictures at his family estate in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in 1816. Over the next decade he developed a process he called héliographie, or sun writing, which the Niépce house museum dates to 1824. In 1827 he made a view from his workroom window, the earliest surviving photograph produced in a camera obscura. In 1829 he entered a partnership with Louis Daguerre, who introduced the daguerreotype in 1839.
Before it existed
The camera obscura could project a scene, but there was no way to keep the image. Niépce was motivated by growing popular demand for affordable pictures, and his experiments aimed both at copying prints and at recording scenes from real life. According to the Harry Ransom Center, the invention depended on centuries of developments in chemistry, optics, and the visual arts.
How it works
To make a heliograph, Niépce dissolved light-sensitive bitumen in oil of lavender and applied a thin coating to a polished pewter plate, which he placed in a camera obscura near a window. After several days of exposure to sunlight, the plate held an impression of the courtyard outside. In Daguerre's process, a silver plate coated with silver iodide was exposed in the camera, developed with mercury vapor, and fixed in salt water, with an exposure of about 30 minutes.
How it spread
The invention of photography was announced in France and England in 1839. That year Hippolyte Bayard found a way to obtain positive images directly on paper, and the announcement prompted William Henry Fox Talbot in England to resume his research, leading to the calotype in 1841, the first negative-positive process. In 1841 the physicist Fizeau made plates more sensitive, cutting exposures to a few seconds and making portraits possible.
What lasted
Later workers replaced each material in turn: glass plates in 1847, collodion in 1851, gelatin in 1871, and flexible celluloid rolls introduced by George Eastman in 1888. In France, Louis Ducos du Hauron made the first color photograph in 1869, and the Lumière brothers introduced the autochrome plate in 1906.
Where it stands today
The 1827 heliograph is held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which bought it in 1963 as part of the Gernsheim Collection. It is the only known surviving camera view by Niépce. His house in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes is a museum. It is open to visitors in summer.
