This Day in Photography History (Daguerre’s New Image-Making System Announced)

January 7, 1839—The art of creating true-to-life images advanced immeasurably with an announcement made at the Academie des Sciences in Paris that Louis Daguerre--best known before as an opera scene-painter and owner of a French spectacle featuring lighting effects known as the Diaroma--had come up with a new method that exposed darkened images to the light.

Technically, Daguerre did not invent photography (Nicéphore Niépce, who had become his partner, is generally credited with doing so). But his decade-long tinkering put the invention in a far more practical form than had been available before.

Daguerre, however, was not the one who made the epochal announcement of this new art form to the French academy. That task was left to the astronomer-physicist D.F. Arago.

Notice in the prior paragraph my use of the phrase “art form.” That’s how I, and many others, think of this use of light and chemistry—that is, when we don’t think of it as a hobby.

Despite the strong interest of writers, painters and newspaper editors, however—the very people one might expect to think of this as an “art form”--Daguerre had been unable to sell his invention. Arago’s intercession with the scientific community is what finally allowed Daguerre to begin making money from all his experimentation.

And money was something he could use. The Diaroma had become something of a sensation in Paris. Yet by the early 1830s, Daguerre had run into financial difficulties. From 1832 to 1835, in fact, he had been bankrupt.

Why did Daguerre’s approach to scientists succeed when his overtures to artists failed? Because scientists recognized in his process a means of examining objects with a level of detail never before realized. Journalist Hippolyte Gaucheraud surely spoke for many of them when he marveled at the image of a dead spider photographed through a solar microscope: "You could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature; [there is] not a filament, not a duct, as tenuous as might be, that you cannot follow and examine."

It would take another eight months before the daguerreotype process (named, of course, after its creator) was announced publicly and not just to scientists. By that time, the French government had bought the rights to it.

More important, Daguerre finally had something to show for his labors. His government had awarded him a pension of six thousand francs a year for the rest of his life. He didn’t add anything new to photography after his discovery, but that didn’t matter from then on—other entrepreneurs from all over the world were ready to make improvements, a process well begun by the time of his death in 1851.