Daguerreotype
Morse met the inventor of the daguerreotype, Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, in Paris in January 1839 when Daguerre's invention was announced [2]. While the daguerreotype fascinated Morse, he was concerned about how the new invention would compete with his telegraph. However, Morse's viewing of the daguerreotype alleviated his fears when he saw how revolutionary its technology was. Morse wrote a letter to his brother Sidney describing Daguerre's invention, which Sidney then published in the New-York Observer on April 20, 1839. While this was not the first report of the daguerreotype to appear in America, it was the first in-person report to appear in the United States.
Daguerreotype
Although the daguerreotype process is sometimes said to have died out completely in the early 1860s, documentary evidence indicates that some very slight use of it persisted more or less continuously throughout the following 150 years of its supposed extinction. A few first-generation daguerreotypists refused to entirely abandon their old medium when they started making the new, cheaper, easier to view but comparatively drab ambrotypes and tintypes. Historically minded photographers of subsequent generations, often fascinated by daguerreotypes, sometimes experimented with making their own or even revived the process commercially as a "retro" portraiture option for their clients. These eccentric late uses were extremely unusual and surviving examples reliably dated to between the 1860s and the 1960s are now exceedingly rare.