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At the fi rst demonstration, held on 7 September 1839,
an audience of nearly one hundred and twenty people
observed each step of the procedure and applauded
Daguerre’s results after an hour and a half.
When the process was successfully carried out, the
results were incomparable. As Samuel Finley Breese
Morse, the American painter and inventor, marveled
after viewing several of Daguerre’s examples before
their public release,
[n]o painting or engraving ever approached it. For
example: In a view up the street, a distant sign would
be perceived, and the eye could just discern that there
were lines of letters upon it, but so minute as not to be
read with the naked eye. By the assistance of a powerful
lens...every letter was clearly and distinctly legible, and
so also were the minutest breaks and lines in the walls
of the buildings, and the pavements of the streets. (qtd.
in Taft, 1964, 12)Yet as Morse noted, these fi rst daguerreotypes were
incapable of capturing any moving objects. Due to the
lengthy time of exposure, the pedestrians and carriages
traveling on the streets in Daguerre’s 1838 picture of the
Boulevard du Temple in Paris were rendered invisible,
with the exception of a man having his boots polished by
a bootblack. Because both men remained stationary for
the duration of the exposure, they are the only traces of
any human presence in the otherwise desolate scene.
This initial shortcoming and the diffi culty of the
process, however, did not hinder the documentary po-
tential of the daguerreotype. In the same year that the
process was revealed to the public, Noël Marie Paymal
Lerebours, an optician and publisher, solicited and
commissioned over a thousand scenic daguerreotypes
of important historical sites around the world. His Ex-
cursions Daguerriennes, published between 1840 and
1844, featured one hundred and fourteen copperplate
engravings taken from daguerreotypes of locations
ranging from Paris to Moscow and Algeria to Niagara
Falls.
In detailing the range of potential uses for the da-
guerreotype, Arago also predicted that it would “procure
for [the artist] an increase in work” conducted “less in
the open air, and more in his studio” and would “provide
physicists and astronomers with very valuable methods
of investigation,” thus benefi ting art and science alike
(qtd. in Gernsheim, 1968, 83). By mid-century, the ac-
curacy and detail of the daguerreotype led to the word’s
broadened popular use as a metaphor for a precise
and vivid description, whether of objects, people, or
memories.
As knowledge and the practice of daguerreotypy
spread throughout the world, an important potential
rival to the process emerged in England. Upon hearing
of Daguerre’s research in early 1839, Talbot presented
examples of his efforts to capture photographic im-
ages on paper to the Royal Society in London in an
effort to protect the integrity of his own discoveries.
Signifi cantly, Talbot’s initial “photogenic” process and
its successor, the calotype, or talbotype, produced a
negative image from which multiple positives could
be printed—a distinct advantage over the necessarily
singular daguerreotype, and a fi rst glimpse of a pho-
tographic process that would come to dominate from
the mid-nineteenth through the late-twentieth century.
But because Talbot was printing on paper rather than
on metal plates, his process yielded less precise images
that did not differ as drastically as did Daguerre’s from
lithography and other manual forms of printing. As Sir
John Herschel complained of Talbot’s process to Arago,
“compared to the masterful daguerreotype, Talbot pro-
duces nothing but mistiness” (qtd. in Newhall, 1964, 33).
What is more, Talbot’s efforts to enforce a patent on his
process signifi cantly restricted its initial use. For these
reasons, the fi nely detailed surface of the daguerreotype
and the publicly available details of its manufacture be-
came more signifi cant than its comparative limitations,
leading to its wider adoption and dominance until the
rise of the wet collodion process in the 1850s.Innovations in the Daguerreotype Process
The desire to put the daguerreotype to use for making
portraits led to international experiments with, and sig-
nifi cant improvements in, Daguerre’s original process
and equipment. Cameras featuring double lenses with
a larger aperture and a shorter focal length, designed by
Josef Petzval and built by Peter Voightländer in Vienna,
offered reduced exposure times better suited to portrait
photography. In America, Alexander S. Wolcott and
John Johnson introduced a camera in 1840 that used
mirrors instead of lenses to focus light on a small da-
guerreian plate, also shortening exposure times, with the
added benefi t of avoiding the reversed image of early
lens cameras. By the mid-1840s, various manufactur-
ers in Europe and America were selling cameras that
were more compact and more portable than Daguerre’s
original camera.
While daguerreotype plates initially were coated with
silver and sized by individual daguerreotypists, newly
formed supply companies in France and America began
offering pre-prepared plates and other materials specifi c
to the emerging trade. A full sheet, or a “whole plate”—
the largest size that fi t in a standardized daguerreotype
camera—measures approximately six and a half by
eight and a half inches. Whole plates were divided into
smaller sizes and offered to customers at lower prices,
resulting in the typical half-, quarter-, sixth-, ninth- and
sixteenth-plate options. In the mid-1840s, American da-
guerreotypists began adding to the layer of silver on their
purchased plates with electroplating, or “galvanizing,”