The man behind the oldest camera photograph also built an early engine
Nicephore Niepce made the oldest surviving camera photograph using asphalt and sunlight, with an exposure that may have lasted several days. Years earlier he and his brother had patented an engine that ran on exploding plant dust and pushed a boat up the Saone. He died broke, his grave paid for by his village.
Born on 7 March 1765 in Chalon-sur-Saone, the son of a wealthy lawyer, he was baptised Joseph but took the name Nicephore at college in Angers, after a ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople. He served as a staff officer in Italy and Sardinia until illness ended that career, then briefly administered the district of Nice before quitting in 1795 to experiment with his older brother Claude. From 1801 the pair lived as gentleman farmers on the family estate, growing beets for sugar.
Their Pyreolophore, patented in 1807, was among the first internal combustion engines ever built. It burned controlled puffs of lycopodium powder, and about ten years later the brothers had it running on fuel injection. They also designed a pump to replace the old machine that lifted Seine water to Versailles, but Napoleon chose a steam engine. In 1818 Niepce built his own version of the new running machine, an ancestor of the bicycle, adding an adjustable saddle.
Lacking the drawing skill for lithography, he wanted light to do the work. Around 1816 he caught camera images on silver chloride paper, but they were negatives that blackened in daylight. He switched to bitumen of Judea, an asphalt that hardens in sunlight; after exposure, lavender oil washed away the unhardened parts. He called it heliography, sun drawing. His first permanent copy, of an engraving of Pope Pius VII in 1822, was destroyed while he tried to print from it, but a camera view made between 1822 and 1827 survives in Texas.
Claude, chasing buyers for their engine in England, squandered the family money and died in 1828. Niepce joined Louis Daguerre in 1829 and died of a stroke on 5 July 1833, penniless. When France bought the daguerreotype, Daguerre received 6,000 francs a year and Niepce's estate 4,000, which his son Isidore resented. Bitumen later became a standard coating for making printing plates, and a lunar crater bears his name.
Source: Nicéphore Niépce
