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.
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.