The word photography comes from two words in the Greek language, the word 'photo' which means 'light' and the word 'graphein' which means 'to draw' so together literally means 'to draw with light.' This is a very accurate term as the process it refers to is that of capturing an image onto a light sensitive material. The term 'photography' was first coined by Sir John Herschel in 1839 but the history of photography dates much further back and the first actual photograph was taken in 1826 by Joseph Niepce using a technique he called 'heliography.'
Joseph Niepce may have taken the first photograph but it was thanks to Louis Daguerre who had been experimenting with ways to permanently capture images since 1789. Louis Daguerre was a set painter for the Opera and a chemist. He was fascinated by the idea of being able to capture the beautiful scenes he saw when he witnessed the operas performed live on stage. He worked with Niepce and found that mixing silver with chalk made a solution that would darken when exposed to light. After Niepce died in 1833 Daguerre carried on and developed a better way of permanently fixing the image by immersing the photographic plate in salt. He called his technique 'daguerreotype' and sold the patent for it to the French government who made it public and made photography very popular. By 1850 there were around 70 Daquerreotype Studios in New York alone.
The draw back of this technique was that there was no way of duplicating the images apart from taking two photographs at the same time with two cameras. Then around 1835 an inventor called William Henry Fox Talbot invented the Calotype. This technique involved paper sheets being covered with silver chloride to produce negatives from which duplicate prints could be made. However Talbot patented this process which limited it popularity as people where not free to use it.
Process times at this stage were still very slow and it was not until we entered the next era of photography in 1851 with the invention of the Collodion process that things would speed up. The Collodion process was invented by the English sculptor Frederick Scott Archer and involved using a glass wet plate rather than paper to capture a negative. This made for much more detailed photographs and the exposure time was only a fracture of the time it had taken before.
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