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".
Daniel DeWitt Tompkins Davie
Davie had wanted to be a painter but gave up the idea for financial reasons. Instead he learned the daguerreotype technique sometime after 1843, and in 1846, he opened his first photography studio, located in Utica, New York. Although Davie was almost entirely self-taught, his professional reputation developed rapidly, and in 1850 he traveled to Washington, DC, where he photographed nearly every member of both houses of Congress along with other public figures. His 1850 daguerreotype of Daniel Webster was considered in its day "one of the most striking likenesses" of that statesman.