Two hundred years on, I wonder what Nicéphore Niépce would make of our worldwide love of photography today, with some 60,000 photos taken every second. Niépce is credited with taking the world’s oldest surviving photograph in 1826 (or 1827, historians disagree) from his brother’s upstairs bedroom window in Le Gras, the family estate in eastern France. We know the exposure was at least eight hours long, since sunlight can be seen on opposite walls, and may have lasted several days. It shows buildings and the surrounding countryside.
Nicéphore and his older brother Claude had previously invented the Pyréolophore, one of the world’s first internal combustion engines, which was able to power a boat upstream on the Saône river. Their attempts to monetize the invention fell short, with Claude squandering the family fortune in England while trying, unsuccessfully, to obtain backing for the engine before suffering from mental illness. Nicéphore went on to develop a velocipede (“dandy-horse” type bicycle) and a water pump before devoting himself to photography.
In September of 1824, he wrote to his brother, “thanks to the refinement of my processes, I have succeeded in obtaining a view as I had wished for, though I scarcely dared to hope for it.” The turning point was his realization that bitumen (a naturally occurring petroleum tar, previously used as a fuel in one of their engines) softened when exposed to light. After applying a thin coat of lavender oil impregnated with bitumen powder onto a pewter (tin alloy) plate, he dried it and put it in the back of a camera obscura to make, essentially, a pinhole camera. Hours — or possibly days — later, he washed off the light-softened bitumen with lavender oil and white petroleum, creating a negative image of the scene. Viewed from an angle, it’s a positive image.
Post-revolutionary France offered little opportunities for entrepreneurs, so in 1827, Nicéphore took this image to England. After visiting his then dying brother, he tried to interest the Royal Society in his invention, but was rejected because he was unwilling to reveal his specific methods. He later had some success developing an improved process in partnership with Louis Daguerre before dying, broke, from a stroke in 1833. Daguerre went on to invent the eponymous daguerreotype, the world’s first practical and (in 1839) publicly available photographic process.
Photo milestones since then worthy of note:
In 1888, photographers were relieved from the complicated and expensive process of film development with the introduction of George Eastman’s $25 Kodak box camera, pre-loaded with a film roll of 100 exposures, that could be mailed back to Kodak in Rochester, New York, for the film to be processed and printed, and the camera reloaded, for $10.
Although earlier and complicated systems to create color photographs had been available for decades (“100-Year Old Color Photographs”, Sept. 23, 2010), color photography became a “thing” in 1935 with the introduction of Kodak’s 35 mm Kodachrome roll film.
Our obsession with photos really took off when Apple brought out its first iPhone in 2007, allowing users to easily snap and share portraits of their cats and dogs. Mainly cats. And, since 2010 (iPhone 4, with its front-facing camera), it’s made selfies the most common type of photo in our narcissistic age.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com) recommends a visit to the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône. It contains millions of early photos, pioneering cameras and Nicéphore’s original Pyréolophore.
This article appears in El Niño is Here.