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".
Paris under Louis-Philippe
Paris was the birthplace of modern photography. A process for capturing images on plates coated with light-sensitive chemicals had been discovered by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827 in rural France. After this death in 1833, the process was refined by the Paris artist and entrepreneur Louis Daguerre, who had invented the Paris Diorama. His new method of photography, called the daguerrotype, was publicly announced to a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris on 19 August 1839. Daguerre gave the rights to the invention to the French nation, which offered them for free to any user in the world. In exchange, Daguerre received a pension from the French state. The daguerrotype became the most common method of photography during the 1840s and 1850s.