Daguerreotype
It is said that Daguerre has found the means to collect, on a plate prepared by him, the image produced by the camera obscura, in such a way that a portrait, a landscape, or any view, projected upon this plate by the ordinary camera obscura, leaves an imprint in light and shade there, and thus presents the most perfect of all drawings ... a preparation put over this image preserves it for an indefinite time ... the physical sciences have perhaps never presented a marvel comparable to this one.
A further clue to fixing the date of invention of the process is that when the Paris correspondent of the London periodical "The Athenaeum" reported the public announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839, he mentioned that the daguerreotypes now being produced were of considerably better quality than the ones he had seen "four years earlier".
Paper texture effects in calotype photography
Practical photography plausibly dates from the announcement of the Daguerreotype in 1839. This stimulated work by others: in 1840, the Englishman Talbot discovered what he called the calotype process for making photographic negatives on writing paper with the relatively short exposure time of a few minutes for subjects in bright sunlight. A positive print could subsequently be made by pressing a negative under glass against another piece of sensitive paper and exposing it to sunlight. For this, negatives were waxed to make them more transparent. Since many prints could be made from a single negative, travel photography became possible, and prints from calotypes were soon distributed in book form and sold in shops. The chemical operations used to make a calotype were not difficult to perform, and relatively few specialized supplies were required. But the process had a serious deficiency, and it was quickly replaced by photography on glass when this became practical.