January 9, 1839: The French Academy of Sciences announces the invention of the daguerreotype.
The daguerreotype process, named for French painter Louis Daguerre, was an early and the earliest practical, widely-used photographic process. Daguerre, who began experimentation in the 1820s, formed a collaborative partnership with Joseph-Nicephore Niépce that failed to produce a reliable process before Niépce’s death in 1833, after which Daguerre continued to experiment, eventually making important headway when he accidentally placed his plates in a cabinet filled with mercury vapor. An 1837 image entitled L’Atelier de l’artiste was claimed to be the first fully developed daguerreotype produced by Daguerre’s revolutionary process, which reduced exposure times to a point that made photography relatively convenient, in addition to commercially viable. The process was announced one hundred and seventy-five years ago on January 9, 1839, the generally accepted birth year of photography.
In one apocryphal story, the French painter Paul Delaroche, upon seeing the daguerreotype process for the first time, was said to have exclaimed
… from today, painting is dead!
Although invented in France, the daguerreotype (which was popularly used for portraiture) was highly popular in the United States; its popularity peaked in the 1850s - at the Great Exposition of 1851, Horace Greeley boasted“in daguerreotypes, it seems to be conceded that we beat the world”. Not long after, however, the daguerreotype process was largely supplanted by other processes.