Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French artist and scientist who brought photography to the masses, was born on this day in 1787. At the time, artists used something called a "camera obscura," a dark chamber used to paint or draw realistic images by copying the view from outside the container and projecting them onto a wall inside. As an artist, Daguerre wanted to find a way to make the images inside the camera obscura permanent. Another Frenchman, Nicéphore Niépce, had created the first photograph by coating a piece of paper in silver chloride and capture small images from a camera onto it as early as 1816, and had found a way to create a permanent image a few years later, though it took several hours of exposure to get the primitive photograph made. Daguerre started working with Niepce in 1929 and prototyped his own process a decade later; in an act of great humility, he dubbed the images resulting from the process "daguerreotypes."
The French government purchased the rights to Daguerre's process in exchange for giving him an annual stipend. The French government then publicized daguerreotypes, explaining the process to a group of esteemed scientists so they could replicate and improve on it. A competing photography technology discovered by Henry Fox Talbot in England was developed the same year as Daguerre's was, but Talbot charged for it. That meant Daguerre's free process was far more popular, even though Talbot's work would inspire later inventors who would develop more effective photo production techniques.
You can read more about Daguerre on the website of the Met Museum, and the history of photography in this timeline from Harvard.
