The photograph is a result of the combination of several technical
discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher
Mo Di and Greek mathematicians Euclid and Aristotle described a camera obscura
in the fifth century BC and the fourth. In the sixth
century Byzantine
mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his
experiments, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (from 965 to 1040) studied the camera
obscura and pinhole camera, Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) has silver nitrate,
exposed, and Georges Fabricius (1516-1571) discovered silver chloride. Daniele
Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg described how light
darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694. The fiction book
published in 1760 by the French author Giphantie Tiphaigne de la Roche,
described what can be interpreted as photography.Invented in the early decades of the 19th century, photography (via camera) seemed able to capture more detail and information from traditional media like painting and sculpture. Photography as a useful process goes back to the 1820s with the development of chemical photography. Gravure was the first permanent image produced in 1822 by French inventor Niepce, but was destroyed by a subsequent attempt to duplicate it. Niépce succeeded once more in 1825. He became the first permanent photograph from nature (his point of view of the Window at Le Gras) with a camera obscura in 1826. However, because his photographs took so long to expose (eight hours), sought a new trial. Working in partnership with Louis Daguerre, they experimented with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1816, a mixture of silver and chalk darkens when exposed to light. Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued the work ultimately led to the development of the daguerreotype in 1837. Daguerre took the first photograph of a person in 1838, when, taking a daguerreotype of a Paris street, a pedestrian stopped for a shoeshine, long enough to be captured by long exposure (several minutes). Finally, France has agreed to pay Daguerre a pension for his formula, in exchange for his promise to announce his discovery to the world as the gift of France, which he did in 1839.
