I have had many and very long interviews with M. Daguerre [he wrote his son on September 2-3, 1827]. He came to see us yesterday. His visit lasted for three hours . . . and the conversation on the subject which interests us is really endless ... I have seen nothing here that impressed me more, that gave me more pleasure, than the Diorama. We were taken through it by M. Daguerre and could contemplate at our ease the magnificent pictures which are exhibited there . . . Nothing is superior to the two views painted by M. Daguerre; one of Edinburgh, taken by moonlight during a fire; the other of a Swiss village, taken at the end of a wide street, facing a mountain of tremendous height, covered with eternal snow. These representations are so real, even in their smallest detail, that one believes that he actually sees rural and primeval nature, with all the illusion with which the charm of color and the magic of chiaroscuro can endow it. The illusion is even so great that one attempts to leave one's box in order to wander out into the open and climb to the summit of the mountain. I assure you there is not the least exaggeration on my part, the objects are, or seem to be, of natural size.
Daguerre, master of lighting effects, had pushed the representation of reality as far as it would go with the resources available. He wanted to go further. Small wonder that the creator of such illusionistic spectacles was interested in the idea of photography!
In England, Niepce met Francis Bauer, secretary of the Royal Society, who urged him to communicate his experiments to the Society. That learned body, however, refused to receive his communication because it was against its rules to discuss secret processes, and Niepce declined to reveal his technique. He gave Bauer samples of his work; three of them, bearing Bauer’s endorsement, are now in the Royal Photographic Society in London. They are pewter plates made from engravings, but Bauer, in a letter to the Literary Gazette, February 27, 1839, stated that Niepce showed him in 1827 "his first successful experiments to fix the image of nature.” A View of Kew by Niepce was shown at the International Inventions Exhibition in 1885; unfortunately, it is now lost.
This evidence indicates that Niepce made negatives in 1816 and direct positives before 1827 with the camera. He started to write an instruction manual On Heliography; or, A Means of Automatically Fixing, by the Action of Light, the Image Formed in the Camera Obscura. It was left undone.
He came back to France in 1829 determined to concentrate on what he called ‘‘view points” (points de vue) with the “sole object to copy nature with the greatest fidelity.” He reopened correspondence with Daguerre. The showman advised him to postpone his book: “As regards your intention of publishing your method, there should be found some way of getting a large profit out of it before publication, apart from the honor the invention will do you.” Lemaitre criticized one of Niepce’s “view points” for its contradictory shadows cast by the sun during the excessively long exposure time. Niepce replied:
Unfortunately I can’t avoid it ... A camera as perfect as M. Daguerre’s is needed, otherwise I shall be condemned to come more or less close to the goal without ever reaching it ... I am, therefore, hastening to reply to his gracious offer to be of service by proposing that he cooperate with me in perfecting my heliographic process.
After nearly three years of polite distrust and trying each other out and leading each other on, Niepce and Daguerre joined articles of partnership, signed at Chalon-sur-Saone on December 4, 1829, to last ten years.
Only four had run their course when, in 1833, Niepce died.
2 THE MIRROR WITH A MEMORY
In 1837 Daguerre macle a brilliant, detailed picture of a corner of his studio, using a modification of Niepce's invention which he considered sufficiently his own to name the daguerreotype. He persuaded Isidore Niepce, who had taken his father’s place as Daguerre’s partner, to agree to a revision in the contract. The process was to be made public jointly with heliography "in order that the name of M. J. Nicephore Niepce may figure always, as it should, in this discovery.” The associates planned to market the process by subscription, but the public would have none of it. They were skeptical of Daguerre’s claim that with his invention “anyone can take the most detailed views in a few minutes.” They could not believe that the daguerreotype was “a chemical and physical process which gives Nature the ability to reproduce herself.”
Daguerre secretly demonstrated his invention to Francois Arago, director of the Paris Observatory. The famous scientist, himself an investigator of light, saw the potentialities of the daguerreotype, lectured on it to the Academy of Sciences, January 7, 1839, and proposed that if, on further investigation, the process was found practical and useful, he would recommend its purchase by the government. A few months later a bill was introduced into the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers. After hearing reports by Arago for the Deputies and Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac for the Peers, both chambers passed the appropriation: Daguerre was to be granted an annuity of 6000 francs and Isidore Niepce an annuity of 4000 francs, in return for which they would “place in the hands of the Ministry of the Interior a sealed package containing the history and most detailed and exact description of the invention mentioned.” For his extra 2000 francs Daguerre was to divulge the processes of his diorama. Arago was directed to make public the technical details at a joint open meeting of the Academy of Science and the Academy of Fine Arts, August 19, 1839.
The public’s reaction to these negotiations was extraordinary. They marvelled over the daguerreotypes shown at the Chamber of Deputies:
In one, representing the Pout Marie, all the minutest indentations and divisions of the ground, or the building, the goods lying on the wharf, even the small stones tin-
sabatier-bloi : Portrait of Daguerre. Daguerreotype.
Eastman Historical Photographic Collection. Rochester, N.Y.
der the water at the edge of the stream, and the different degrees of transparency given to the water, were all shown with the most incredible accuracy.
The Leipzig Anzeiger —for the news spread rapidly throughout Europe — went so far as to brand the process sacrilegious. Excitement ran high; on the day set for formal publication, all Paris was tense.
Daguerre was not at the meeting; he had excused himself because of a sore throat, and the process was described — but not demonstrated — by Arago.
An eye witness — Marc Antoine Gaudin — relates that
the Palace of the Institute was stormed by a swarm of the curious at the memorable sitting on August 19, 1839, where the process was at long last divulged. Although I came two hours beforehand, like many others I was barred from the hall. I was on the watch with the crowd for everything that happened outside. At one moment an excited man comes out; he is surrounded, he is questioned, and he answers with a know-it-all air, that bitumen of Judea and lavender oil is the secret. Questions are multiplied, but as he knows nothing more, we are reduced to talking about bitumen of Judea and lavender oil. Soon the crowd surrounds a newcomer, more startled than the last. He tells us with no further comment that it is iodine and mercury. Finally the sitting is over, the secret is divulged . . .
A few days later, opticians’ shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first trial got a silhouette of roof tops against the sky. He went into ecstasies over chimneys, counted over and over roof tiles and chimney bricks, was astonished to see the very mortar between the bricks — in a word, the technique was so new that even the poorest proof gave him indescribable joy.