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".
Frederick Langenheim
Langenheim and his brother William began working in 1840 for a German language newspaper edited by George Francis Schreiber in Philadelphia. Langenheim acquired a daguerreotype camera in 1841 from Von Voigtlander and formed a partnership with Schreiber in a photographic studio business for a couple of years. In 1843 Langenheim went into the photography studio business with his brother at 26–27 Exchange Street in Philadelphia. It was the "W. & F. Langenheim" firm and known as the Philadelphia daguerrotype establishment. They made in 1842 the first advertising picture in history. It was of patrons eating and drinking in the restaurant in the Philadelphia Exchange Building. The picture of people dining was hung in the hall of the building to attract potential customers for the dining room.
In 1845, Langenheim took the first set of panoramic pictures of Niagara Falls ever photographed. The panoramic set of five adjacent scenes were placed in panels in a display frame. The daguerreotype pictures were the first of Niagara Falls according to photo historian Robert Taft (1894-1955). They were the first such pictures to gain world fame. There were eight sets of copies made. A set was sent to Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and five crowned heads of Europe, Queen Victoria, and one each to the reigning rulers of Brunswick, Prussia, Saxony, and Wurttemberg. The seventh set was given to United States president James Knox Polk. The eighth set was retained by the Langenheim brothers.