The daguerreotype was the first type of practical photographic reproduction, though the process was very difficult and had limited applications as a result of the time needed to produce an image. The process was used for about a decade before it gave way to a different process, but in that time the daguerreotype was an important means of preserving images from the early period of photography.
Louis Jacques MandT Daguerre was born in 1789 and died in 1851, the year when his process began to give way to the wet collodion process. Daguerre was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Seine-et-Oise, France. He was originally a scene painter in the theater, and in 1822 he established the Diorama, a theatrical spectacle that required large panoramic paintings. He would achieve accurate details and perspective in these huge paintings with the use of basic sketches he made with the aid of a camera obscura, a means of projecting a scene through a pinhole to reproduce it on a wall. Daguerre wanted to make the camera obscura images permanent with a light-sensitive substance. Whatever early experiments he may have made have been lost, and the first report of any success comes in 1829 when Daguerre learned that Joseph NicTphore Niepce was working on the same problem and had had some success. The two met and agreed to a partnership. Niepce had been working for several years on an asphalt process, and Daguerre decided it was impractical. Niepce died in 1833. Daguerre returned to Niepce's early work with silver salts, and he found that silver iodide was more sensitive to light than silver nitrate. His most important discovery was the latent image as he found that mercury would develop an image on a silver plate sensitized with silver iodide after an exposure of 10 to 15 minutes (Niepce had required ours to obtain an image). Daguerre also found in time that common salt would make the image permanent, while Niepce had never been able to fix his ima...