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".
Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière
In 1839, Joly was in Paris at the time when Louis Daguerre unveiled his early photographic process to the scientific world. Embarking on a trip to the Middle East, Pierre-Gustave acquired one of the first daguerreotype cameras from Noël Paymal Lerebours in order to make photographic records of the ancient monuments he was about to see on his journey. He travelled via Malta to Greece, where he visited Athens and other places, and then carried on to Alexandria. There, he met the painter Horace Vernet and his nephew, Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, who were also carrying daguerreotype equipment. The three men undertook some excursions in Egypt together before parting company. Joli then travelled to the Holy Land, Syria and Turkey. Back in Paris, five of his 92 plates were published by Lerebours in his book "Excursions daguerriennes" (1840–41), others by architect Hector Horeau for his book "Panorama from Egypt and Nubia" (1841). Due to technological restrictions, the daguerretypes themselves could not be reproduced and, instead, were copied as engravings which could then be printed. None of Joly's original plates has been identified, and they may well be lost. What they contained is known through his diary which has been published in 2011.