Nicéphore Niépce
Nicéphore Niépce was born in 1765 as Joseph Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône. From 1786 to 1788 he studied at the Oratorian brothers in Angers. Then he entered the National Guard. In 1789 he enlisted in the Revolutionary Army.
With one of his two brothers he always discussed inventive ideas. In 1807 their technological interests resulted in their invention of the world's first combustion engine, the Pyreolophore, on which they held the patent for 10 years.
In the 1820 Niépce made a lot of photographic experiments. He used glass plates coated with Judea bitumen. In 1822 he made his first blue-prints of drawings with just light falling on a drawing that lay on such a plate. In 1824 he made the first photographs on coated lithographic stone with a camera obscura. The exposure time was several days. He also let try the etcher Augustin Lemaitre using etching methods to make printing plates of enlighted bitumen coated copper plates.
In 1825 he asked the opticians Vincent and Charles Chevalier improve his camera with better lenses. In 1827 he made etching attempts with enlighted coated tin plates. The only unetched of these images on tin is the earliest preserved photograph. In 1828 he made images on polished silver plates which he exposed to iodine vapors after exposure.
In 1829 his partnership with Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre began. In 1832 it resulted in a new photographic process with a distillat of lavender oil as a photosensitive agent, the first one needing less than than 8 hours exposure time. Niépce named their process the Physautotype. One year later he died. His son Isidore became the new partner of Daguerre. On the base of Daguerre's further inventions the photography was introduced to the public in 1839, but Isidore as his partner shared the high reward given to them by the French government.
