Photography

Photography was announced to the world in 1839. In January, the French government publicised the daguerreotype, a process developed by Louis Daguerre, who had worked with Nicephore Niepce, the inventor of the earliest surviving photograph made around 1826. In August the French state bought the rights and gave the process to the public as a gift. Daguerreotypes were sharp, one-off images on silvered copper plates. In England, William Henry Fox Talbot made a rival process using paper negatives that could produce many prints, and the astronomer John Herschel contributed the term photography and the use of fixing agents. Over the next decades, photography spread quickly through portraiture, journalism and science, and the development of film and cameras brought it to the masses.

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