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August 19, 2024

— Louis Daguerre

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Free to the world

Here's a moment that blows my mind: About 185 years ago, a man in Paris stopped to have a shoe shine boy polish his boots.

Neither the man nor the boy had any idea that they were standing in view of the open window of a studio belonging to Louis Daguerre, who was experimenting with his new method of photography -- eventually known as the daguerreotype -- and taking a picture of the Boulevard du Temple.

This was a very early camera, and the exposure time was about five minutes. That meant that besides the man and the boy, nobody else on the crowded street remained still long enough to be recorded. Thus, their blurry images are contained in what is considered the first surviving photograph of human beings.

It's wild to think that despite being in this photograph, they likely had no idea that the technology even existed -- and certainly not about their place in it.

A year or two later (educated guess, because we don't know the exact date of the photo), Daguerre's studio was consumed by fire. Fortunately, he impressed on the firefighters to save his daguerreotype plates before anything else.

A few months after that, he worked out an unusual arrangement with the French government, turning over all of his intellectual property rights to the daguerreotype process in exchange for a lifetime pension for himself and for the son of another inventor who had died not long before named Joseph Niépce.

Result: France was able to announce on August 19, 1839, that it was releasing the technology behind the daguerreotype process as a gift, "free to the world."

Why would France do this? Mainly because this was a time in history when France was eager to be regarded as a leader in culture and science, and sharing the process with Daguerre's name attached, even for free, ensured that it would be seen as a French innovation.

Of course, daguerreotypes began to decline in the 1850s, becoming largely obsolete by the 1860s -- but they still had about as long a technological relevance as say, the cassette tape or VHS tape a century later.

But for that roughly 20-year period, daguerreotypes were the thing, and it's why we have photographic images of former president Andrew Jackson when he was 78 in about 1845, or Congressman-elect Abraham Lincoln, at age 37 in late 1846 or 1847 -- or for that matter, the solar eclipse of July 28, 1851.

Daguerre himself gets our quote of the day, and it might take a minute to sink in but I like it a lot:

So let the sun draw your pictures, and find a way to give a gift free to the world. Like the man and boy in the early photo, you might never know the impact you have on the world.

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