Who invented photography?
Paris under Louis-Philippe
Paris was the birthplace of modern photography. A process for capturing images on plates coated with light-sensitive chemicals had been discovered by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827 in rural France. After this death in 1833, the process was refined by the Paris artist and entrepreneur Louis Daguerre, who had invented the Paris Diorama. His new method of photography, called the daguerrotype, was publicly announced to a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris on 19 August 1839. Daguerre gave the rights to the invention to the French nation, which offered them for free to any user in the world. In exchange, Daguerre received a pension from the French state. The daguerrotype became the most common method of photography during the 1840s and 1850s.
Helmut Gernsheim
In 1945, at Newhall's prompting, Helmut and Alison Gernsheim started collecting the works of historic photographers, especially British ones, which were disappearing. They amassed a huge collection containing work by such luminaries as Julia Margaret Cameron, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Hill & Adamson, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Louis Daguerre. They rediscovered the long-lost hobby of Lewis Carroll when in 1947 Helmut stumbled across an album of Carroll's portraits in a junk shop. Ultimately this collection, along with an estimated 3–4 million words of notes on the subject led to his writing the 180,000-word book "The History of Photography". When the first edition was published by the OUP in 1955 it became an instant classic and the definitive reference work for historians of photography for decades afterwards, being described by Beaumont Newhall as "a milestone in the history of photography" and by other reviewers as "the photographer's bible" and "an encyclopaedic work". Along the way, in 1952 Gernsheim discovered the long-lost world's first permanent photograph from nature, created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 ("View from the Window at Le Gras"). Helmut and Alison continued to publish numerous articles and books on various aspects of photography and a variety of photographers.