Photography in the United States
In spring 1839, the daguerreotype was introduced into the United States by an Englishman named D.W. Seager, who took the first photograph of a view of St. Paul’s Church and a corner of the Astor House in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Painter and inventor Samuel Finley Breese Morse had met Louis Daguerre in Paris in the spring of 1839, becoming the first American to see his photographic process and becoming enamored with it as a result. When he returned to the United States later that year, he enthusiastically promoted the daguerreotype while hailing Seager's prototypical image. Morse had painted "The Gallery of the Louvre" in 1833, and the appeal of the medium of the daguerreotype was an obvious one to him: it was a means of making faithful copies of artworks, in addition to anything else that would be still in front of the slow eye of the camera.
Louis Daguerre
When the first reports of the French Academy of Sciences announcement of Daguerre's invention reached Talbot, with no details about the exact nature of the images or the process itself, he assumed that methods similar to his own must have been used, and promptly wrote an open letter to the Academy claiming priority of invention. Although it soon became apparent that Daguerre's process was very unlike his own, Talbot had been stimulated to resume his long-discontinued photographic experiments. The "developed out" daguerreotype process only required an exposure sufficient to create a very faint or completely invisible latent image which was then chemically developed to full visibility. Talbot's earlier "sensitive paper" (now known as "salted paper") process was a "printed out" process that required prolonged exposure in the camera until the image was fully formed, but his later calotype (also known as talbotype) paper negative process, introduced in 1841, also used latent image development, greatly reducing the exposure needed, and making it competitive with the daguerreotype.