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.
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.