Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (b.1787, d.1851)

Born in Carmeilles-en-Parisi. He became an apprentice to a local painter and later went on to become an acclaimed stage designer in Paris. He frequently used a camera obscura as a drawing aid. Later he discovered the work of Nichephore Niepce and quickly formed a partnership with him to aquire and learn this new technology before Niepce took the secret to the grave. After Neipce died in 1833, Daguerre continued to experiment with glass plates and an assortment of different chemicals in attempts to capture and fix an image. Daguerre was finally able to do this by an accidental discovery in which he put an exposed plate in a cabinet and came to find days later that the image on the plate had developed due to the mercury vapour from a broken thermometer. This discoer was very important because it allowed Daguerre to greatly reduce exposure times from 8 hours to around 30 minutes. This process is what became the 'Daguerreotype'.

Because Daguerre had political connections and powerful friends such as Francois Arago who presented the invention of photography to the Academies of Fine Arts and Sciences, he was able to put his invention on a fastrack to success. In truth, Daguerre was not the first to properly expose and fix an image. It was Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887). However, Bayard was not acknowledged for his work and as a matter of fact was tricked by Francois Arago to postpone his invention so that Daguerre could take the credit. For the rest of Bayard's life, he felt wronged and betrayed by Arago and Daguerre which is most evident in a self portrait he did which depicts him drowning himself. After Arago gave photography its premier, it agreed upon that anyone Frenchmen was allowed to use the new technology free of charge although anyone outside of France had to pay an equivalent to a patent fee. This, however, was loosly if ever enforced which led to photography diffusing across Europe and subsenquently, America.http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/daguerr.htm
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