{"id":26479,"date":"2025-07-21T16:19:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T16:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/26479\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T16:19:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T16:19:07","slug":"the-first-photograph-ever-taken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/26479\/","title":{"rendered":"The First Photograph Ever Taken"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>          Welcome to the New Day Cafe! This is an open thread.<\/p>\n<p>Open Culture recently posted a piece on the earliest photograph, taken in 1826 by a man with whom most are unfamiliar.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn histories of early photography, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.metmuseum.org\/essays\/daguerre-1787-1851-and-the-invention-of-photography\" title=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Louis Daguerre<\/a> faithfully appears as one of the fathers of the medium. His patented process, the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Daguerreotype\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">daguerreotype<\/a>, in wide use for nearly twenty years in the early 19th century, produced so many of the images we associate with the period, including famous photographs of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mentalfloss.com\/article\/31357\/24-vintage-photographs-abe-lincoln\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Abraham Lincoln<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.getty.edu\/art\/collection\/object\/1040HX\" title=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Edgar Allan Poe<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amherst.edu\/library\/archives\/holdings\/edickinson\/dickinsondag\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Emily Dickinson<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/john-browns-famous-photograph-141898158\/?no-ist\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">John Brown<\/a>. But had things gone differently, we might know better the harder-to-pronounce name of his onetime partner <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nic%C3%A9phore_Ni%C3%A9pce\" title=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Joseph Nic\u00e9phore Ni\u00e9pce<\/a>, who produced the first known photograph ever, taken in 1826.<\/p>\n<p>Something of a gentleman inventor, Ni\u00e9pce (below) began experimenting with lithography and with that ancient device, the camera obscura, in 1816. Eventually, after much trial and error, Ni\u00e9pce developed his own photographic process, which he called \u201cheliography&#8230;\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the Ransom Center website, you can see a <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20180222123813\/http:\/\/www.hrc.utexas.edu\/exhibitions\/permanent\/firstphotograph\/history\/#top\" title=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">short video describing<\/a> Ni\u00e9pce\u2019s house and showing how scholars recreated the vantage point from which he took the picture. <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20170304040936\/http:\/\/www.hrc.utexas.edu\/exhibitions\/permanent\/firstphotograph\/process\/#top\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Another video<\/a> offers insight into the process Ni\u00e9pce invented to create his \u201cheliograph.\u201d In 1827, Ni\u00e9pce 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/royalsociety.org\/about-us\/who-we-are\/history\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Royal Society<\/a>. His findings were rejected, however, because he opted not to fully reveal the details, hoping to make economic gains with a proprietary method. Ni\u00e9pce left the pewter image with Bauer and returned to France, where he shortly after agreed to a ten-year partnership with Daguerre in 1829.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This is an open thread. Please join us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to the New Day Cafe! This is an open thread. Open Culture recently posted a piece on&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":["post-26479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}