Inventions & Discoveries · Communication and computing
Photography
Photography, whose name means 'drawing of light', is the capture of camera images on light-sensitive materials; the first such image to be fixed was made by the French scientist Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827, after an exposure of hours or days. His partner Louis Daguerre developed the daguerreotype, the first publicly announced and commercially viable process, whose details were made public in Paris in August 1839. Henry Fox Talbot's developed-out silver halide negative process, which allowed many prints from one negative, remains the basic technology of chemical film cameras.
On the inventions tree
- First known
- 1826–1827
- Where
- Le Gras, France
- Credited to
- Nicéphore Niépce · Louis Daguerre · Kingdom of France
Also arose independentlyEngland (Henry Fox Talbot) (1835); Brazil (Hercule Florence) (1832–1833)
NoteThe article notes that Johann Heinrich Schulze's fleeting images of stencilled letters, about 1717, are 'sometimes regarded as the very first form of photography', that Thomas Wedgwood made the first reliably documented attempt to capture camera images around 1800 but could not fix them, and that Hippolyte Bayard developed a method of his own but was not recognised as its inventor because he delayed announcing it.
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See also
Cite this entry
- APA
- The Epoch Institute. (2026). Photography. In The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/photography
- MLA
- “Photography.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia, The Epoch Institute, 2026, https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/photography. Accessed .
- Chicago
- The Epoch Institute. “Photography.” The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. 2026. https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/photography.
- Harvard
- The Epoch Institute (2026) ‘Photography’, The Epoch Institute Encyclopedia. Available at: https://the-epoch-institute.org/encyclopedia/photography (Accessed: ).
Last reviewed October 2026Random entry ↻