Startup: The First Photograph

View from the Window at Le Gras - The world's first photograph, taken in 1827. On display at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

As engineerd™ pointed out yesterday, film is dead; however, it’s not the first photographic medium to die. Most photo history buffs are familiar with the daguerreotype, created by Louis Daguerre. A silver plate is polished and exposed to iodine – the resulting silver-iodide is sensitive to light. Exposures took about 30 minutes, which is why most portraits from the 1800′s look so lifeless.

The first photo, however, was a heliograph (helios was Greek for Sun, and graphos was Greek for writing) by Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce. From his background as a printer, Niepce thought to use bitumen of Judea (an ancient Egyptian asphalt) because he knew it would harden in light. By coating a plate and leaving it in view of his camera obscura, the bitumen would harden in the light, allowing the softer, unexposed bitumen to be washed away and leaving a permanent image. The process wasn’t perfect – try to make out the rooftops in the photo above. He later partnered with Daguerre to come up with a process that would give better images and didn’t take 8 hours to expose. Niepce died four years into the partnership, and his son was afraid that Daguerre would take all the credit for their work and refused to help continue the research. As a result, Daguerre had to finish on his own and got all the credit anyway.