A French painter in Brazil may have named photography before anyone in Europe
Hércules Florence, a French artist living in Campinas, Brazil, was experimenting with silver salts on paper by 1832 and called the result photographie in private notes apparently dated 1834. Obscure and far from Europe's scientific circles, he died without recognition, and his claim became widely known only after a historian's research in 1980.
Photography, from Greek roots meaning drawing with light, combined two old ideas. The first was the camera obscura, a darkened room or box where light through a small hole projects an upside-down scene; it was known in ancient China and described by Aristotle and Euclid. Ibn al-Haytham, around the year 1000, gave the first correct geometric analysis and projected images onto a screen. The second was chemistry: Albertus Magnus found silver nitrate, and around 1717 Johann Heinrich Schulze captured stencilled letters on a bottle of light-sensitive slurry.
In 1802 Thomas Wedgwood tried recording camera images on paper treated with silver nitrate, but the images were too faint and his shadow prints eventually went dark all over. Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in 1826 with his View from the Window at Le Gras, the oldest surviving photograph of a real scene, which needed an exposure of at least eight hours and perhaps days. He partnered with Louis Daguerre in secrecy, and after Niépce died in 1833, Daguerre switched to silver compounds. By 1837 his process of iodine-sensitised silver plates developed in mercury vapour cut exposures to minutes.
In 1838, photographing a busy Paris boulevard, Daguerre caught the first confirmed image of a person: a man standing still to have his boots polished, while moving traffic vanished from the long exposure. In Britain, William Fox Talbot had secretly made paper images from 1834 and rushed his method into print in 1839 after hearing of Daguerre. His 1840 calotype produced a negative from which many prints could be made.
John Herschel supplied the vocabulary, introducing the words photography, negative and positive, and the chemistry, showing that sodium thiosulphate could fix images permanently. He also invented the cyanotype, the process behind the blueprint. The word itself first appeared in print in a Berlin newspaper in February 1839.
Source: Photography
