For hundreds of years, scientists and artists all over the world had been playing around with the camera obscura to project images and understand the properties of light and colour but no one could work out how to fix the image.
Watch this to see the camera obscura in action:
Then in the early 1800s, a bunch of mostly rich white dudes including Nicéphore Niépce, Sir John Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot took advantage of the recent advances in chemistry and experimented with exposing different chemicals to sunlight in order to get the image to stay permanently.
They started gaining success in the late 1830s. Then in 1839, Niépce’s partner Louis Daguerre announced the production of his new invention: the Daguerreotype camera!
Family History Takeaway: This means you won’t have any photos of members of your family from before 1839.
The next post in this series will be about the Daguerreotype.
Kindred Secrets 