Louis Daguerre turns 225

Louis Daguerre was born in 1787 in Cormeilles France, he was a painter and physicist who is credited with one of the earliest photographic mediums thus here we have an image of London in 1839, the street appears to be uninhabited

Louis Dagurre`s technique required ten to twenty minutes exposure thus the people on this street have vanished because they were moving. Most of Daguerre`s early images were destroyed in a fire in his Paris studio in 1839.

This image is of Paris in 1838 one must notice the man getting his shoe polished and is considered the earliest known image of a person photographed. Daguerre`s name is one of 72 prestigious french names engraved on the sides of the Eiffel tower, the list contains no women.

This is an image of Louis Daguerre in 1844 who became known as the inventor of the diorama and because of his love of diorama he thought the photographic process fit right in with this invention. The Daguerreotype unfortunately could only be made as a one off image while competing techniques produced a plate that could yield many copies of the image and Daguerre`s technology became inferior and unwanted.

Louis Daguerre died of a heart attack in July of 1851 leaving a legacy in the early development in the science of photography which in the last century and a half has changed the world in the same light as the automobile and the computer.