It's the birthday of the man who helped invent the art of photography, Louis
Daguerre, born just outside of Paris, France (1789). He studied to be an
architect as a young man, but instead he went into theater set design. He was famous
for the lifelike detail of his work, and he began to experiment
with hand-painted translucent screens and elaborate lighting effects. He could use
his screens and lights to create the illusion of a sunrise or a
sudden storm onstage.

At the time, most painters were using a device called a camera obscura, which could
cast a silhouette of an image onto a canvas for the artist to
trace. But in the early 1800s, many scientists were looking for a way to capture the
projected image forever. Daguerre wanted to do the same thing,
and in 1829, he met an amateur inventor named Joseph Niepce, who had developed a
light-sensitive pewter plate that could hold the image projected
onto it. But the images took eight hours to develop, and the quality was extremely
poor. Niepce died before he could improve the process.

Daguerre spent the next few years expanding on Ni?pce's experiments, and he
eventually came up with a combination of copper plate coated with silver
salts that could be developed in about 30 minutes with the application of mercury
vapor and table salt. He then set out to take a series of pictures
of Paris, capturing images of the Louvre and Notre Dame. The camera needed about 15
minutes of exposure time to capture an image, so most of
Daguerre's early pictures don't show any people. The one exception is a picture of a
boulevard that shows a man in the foreground who has stopped to
shine his shoes. He was the first human being ever caught on film.

Daguerre announced his invention in 1839, and the images he produced became known as
daguerreotypes. It wasn't photography as we know it today,
because it only produced a single unique image, rather than multiple copies of the
same image. But people were amazed at the level of detail it could
reproduce.

Louis Daguerre said, "I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight."