The camera inside a modern smartphone, filled with dozens of megapixels capable of 4K resolution and beyond, is the pinnacle of 180 years of innovation. Its story begins on January 9, 1839, when the French Academy of Sciences introduced the daguerreotype, the first commercially successful photographic process, named after its French inventor, Louis Daguerre. The daguerreotype popularized the previously clunky process of developing a camera image into a permanent, physical photograph. This is the very birthplace of photography, from which all future technologies tinkered and iterated, ultimately transforming into the cameras in our pockets today.
Before Daguerre’s creation, early “photographs” were extremely grainy and took at least eight hours of exposure (in favorable, sunny conditions) to capture a single image. The daguerreotype produced a much clearer image in about a half hour. It worked by exposing copper plates coated with silver iodide to fumes of mercury then fixed with a salt solution. As with most technologies, the daguerreotype was soon rendered obsolete (by the wet collodion process invented in 1851), but its influence was cemented: The innovation had made photography accessible and practical. From that day forward, memories were made physical, history was empirically captured, and the world became framed within a camera’s lens.
