Photography in the United States
In spring 1839, the daguerreotype was introduced into the United States by an Englishman named D.W. Seager, who took the first photograph of a view of St. Paul’s Church and a corner of the Astor House in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Painter and inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse had met Louis Daguerre in Paris in the spring of 1839, becoming the first American to see his photographic process and becoming enamored with it as a result. When he returned to the United States later that year, he enthusiastically promoted the daguerreotype while hailing Seager's prototypical image. Morse had painted "The Gallery of the Louvre" in 1833, and the appeal of the medium of the daguerreotype was an obvious one to him: it was a means of making faithful copies of artworks, in addition to anything else that would be still in front of the slow eye of the camera.
Daguerreotype
The other major innovation was a chemical one. In Daguerre's original process, the plate was sensitized by exposure to iodine fumes alone. A breakthrough came with the discovery that when exposure to bromine or chlorine fumes was correctly combined with this, the sensitivity of the plate could be greatly increased, which in turn greatly reduced the required exposure time to between fifteen and thirty seconds in favorable lighting conditions, according to Eder. Several experimenters discovered the propensity of using chlorine and bromine in addition to iodine: Wolcott, whose "Wolcott's mixture" was marketed by his partner, John Johnson that they called "quickstuff"; two unrelated individuals with the surname Goddard – Philadelphia physician and chemist Paul Beck Goddard, and John Frederick Goddard who lectured at the Adelaide Gallery before assisting Beard with setting up the first daguerreotype portraiture studio on the roof of the Regent Street Polytechnic; (John Frederick Goddard was the first to publish information that bromine increased the sensitivity of daguerreotype plates in the "Literary Gazette" of 12 December 1840) and in Vienna: Krachowila and the Natterer brothers.