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First Light

Today (or yesterday, depending on your time zone) is the anniversary of the first bootprint on the Moon, 56 years ago. We know it happened (if you don't believe it did, wow are you in the wrong place right now) in part because they sent photographic images. There was a first one of those, too, but it was a bit further back in history. From Open Culture:

    The First Photograph Ever Taken (1826)  

In histories of early photography, Louis Daguerre faithfully appears as one of the fathers of the medium.

Near as I can tell, Daguerre means something like "of war," which explains the next 200 years of war photography.

But had things gone differently, we might know better the harder-to-pronounce name of his onetime partner Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who produced the first known photograph ever, taken in 1826.

Nah, lucky name, is all. "daguerrotype" sounds better than "niépcotype."

Eventually, after much trial and error, Niépce developed his own photographic process, which he called “heliography.”

Yeah, that wasn't going to catch on, either.

In 1827, Niépce traveled to England to visit his brother. While there, with the assistance of English botanist Francis Bauer, he presented a paper on his new invention to the Royal Society. His findings were rejected, however, because he opted not to fully reveal the details, hoping to make economic gains with a proprietary method.

Oh, come on, it's because he was French.

Sadly for Niépce, his heliograph would not produce the financial or technological success he envisioned, and he died just four years later in 1833. Daguerre, of course, went on to develop his famous process in 1839 and passed into history, but we should remember Niépce’s efforts, and marvel at what he was able to achieve on his own with limited materials and no training or precedent.

Remember how, yesterday, we talked about accidental inventions? Well, this one's something of the opposite of that.

Niépce’s pewter plate image was re-discovered in 1952 by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, who published an article on the find in The Photographic Journal.

Photography, and its derivative the motion picture (also a French invention, of course), is a key tool of communication now, though the process has changed. I find it remarkable that the image survived nearly 200 years. I doubt most of today's selfies will.