I originally wrote and published this in Connected Photographer, but in honor of Louis Daguerre’s 224th birthday today, I wanted to share with you this ultimate DIY story.
The year was 1826. The American Temperance Society was founded that year. Mahmud II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, crushed the last mutiny of janissaries in Istanbul. Julia Boggs Dent, who would become the wife of Ulysses S. Grant, was born and both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died that year. John Adams’ son, John Quincy Adams, was president. Aluminum had been discovered just a year earlier and slavery was still a big part of American life.
Clint Eastwood once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations”. In 1826, Nicephore Niepce was a man who was getting in touch with his own internal Dirty Harry. When Nicephore was born in Chalon-sur-Satne, he was named Joseph Niepce. His father was a counselor to the King. At the age of 23, Nicephore changed his name from the biblically-reminiscent Joseph to Nicephore, derived from the Greek word “nike”, meaning “victory” and “phoreo”, which means “to carry” or “to bear”. Besides being a masculine name, the related name Nikephoros was also a title borne by the goddess Athena.
In 1807, Nicephore and his brother Claude obtained a patent, signed by Napoleon, for the Pyreolophore. Apparently, Nicephore liked words ending in “phore”, and this “phore”, the Pyreolophore (say that three times, fast!) was the world’s first internal combustion engine.
Lithography
In any case, back in 1826, good ol’ 61 year old Nicephore was fascinated by lithography, what was then a pretty revolutionary printing process. Unfortunately, since photography didn’t exist, if you wanted to use lithography to produce an image, you had to be able to draw.
Not a stupid man, this Nicephore. But also not much of an artist. If Nicephore wanted to put pictures in his lithography, he had to draw them himself. Nicephore was a man who knew his limitations and knew drawing was beyond his reach. But if he could create a photographic image, then he’d no longer need to draw.
Before 1826, photography was a fleeting thing. You could “take” a picture, in the sense that you could create an image on the wall, but you couldn’t take it with you. Photography was merely a tool to help in drawing.
The camera obscura
Artists today draw and paint on walls by placing a transparency on an overhead projector, projecting the image on the wall, and tracing and painting over it.
Well, back in the old days, you could get an image to show up on a wall using a camera obscura. Placed in a darkened room, the camera obscura would transmit light from a pinhole (like an early pinhole camera) and project it onto a wall. Unfortunately, as the day’s light waned, so did the picture and even if you could take the wall with you, the picture wouldn’t come along for the ride.
People had been able to project and fiddle with light and shadow for centuries, but they never really figured out how to “fix” an image to something and make it stick. This is where nice Nicephore comes in. He figured out how to get an image to stick. But he didn’t fix the image to paper. Instead, in 1826, he managed to get the image to stick to a polished pewter plate.
Nicephore’s forays into photographic fabulousness didn’t begin in 1826, of course. This stuff takes time. He actually started tinkering with the problem back in 1816. He first took transparent engravings and placed them on glass plates coated with varnish. Trying to get photos to stick would initially be a sticky proposition.
Experimenting with different materials
Nicephore worked quite hard to make his plan come together. In his earliest experiments, he coated paper with silver salts (which blackened with daylight). He placed this paper at the back of a camera obscura and in May of 1816, got his first image. This one was a negative and didn’t last. Once daylight hit the paper, the entire sheet became completely black.
Wanting to create positive images, true renderings of what his eye could see, Nicephore tried using different substances that reacted to light by bleaching, rather than darkening the paper. He tinkered with salts, iron oxide, and manganese black oxide. He did make some progress, but he kept running up against the issue of how to get rid of the chemicals that weren’t light-reactive.
Nicephore figured that acid was a nasty enough substance that it ought to do something. So he tried to use acid to etch images. His theory was that he could spread acid on calcareous (chalky) stone and that the acid’s strength would vary according to the intensity of the light, thereby etching the image into the stone.
