Louis Daguerre and the pioneers of photography

Louis Daguerre devised the daguerreotype, the first successful form of permanent photography. The French physicist developed the process for transferring photographs onto silver-coated copper plates. His discovery was made by an accident, according to the writer Robert Leggat, who said Daguerre put an exposed plate in a chemical cupboard in 1835 only to later find it have developed a latent image. The daguerreotype process was unveiled at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839. It became the first commercially successful was of getting permanent images from a camera.

Louis Jacques Daguerre's first surviving daguerreotype image, of a collection of plaster casts on a window ledge, which he produced on a silver plate, in 1837

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