298 The Dawn of Light Printing. [July, 



as the beautiful method of his French rival, have been far more 

 fruitful in their subsequent career, and form assuredly the 

 true basis of the processes of to-day. Among other discoveries, 

 that of producing numberless positives from one negative 

 may be cited as of exceeding importance, a circumstance 

 which shows, moreover, that Talbotype is quite dissimilar 

 from Daguerreotype (where only one image can be produced 

 for each exposure in the camera), and that it is in principle 

 identically the same as our present mode of proceeding. 

 But we shall endeavour to show, and we hope also to prove 

 most undeniably, that Niepce, whose name is generally but 

 incidentally mentioned as a participator in the discovery, 

 ranks, if not above, certainly upon an equal footing with 

 Talbot and Daguerre as an early traveller along the road 

 of photographic science. Indeed, if we take photography 

 to mean simply the reproduction of an object or landscape 

 in nature, caught up in the camera upon a sensitive screen 

 upon which it remains after the action of light has ceased, 

 we cannot but regard Nicephore Niepce as the first 

 accomplished photographer, an inventor, moreover, who 

 had attained his end, not by any stroke of good fortune, but 

 as the result of patient and untiring investigation. Un- 

 fortunately for him, as in the case of many other inventors 

 and discoverers, past and to come, he never reaped in any 

 way the glory and advantages of his labours ; but, on the 

 contrary, has been during the past few years in a fair way 

 of losing almost entirely the bare honour to which he is so 

 justly entitled. Any contribution to the true history of so 

 great an art-science as photography must, we feel sure, be 

 acceptable to all students of science, and for this reason 

 we make no apology for introducing to the readers of 

 the "Quarterly Journal of Science" a few facts tending 

 to place Niepce in a more favourable position than he has 

 hitherto held as one only among many rivals. 



Of the invention of Daguerreotype we know comparatively 

 little. Daguerre himself never gave any explicit account of 

 his early researches, with the exception of the manner in 

 which the development of the latent image first became 

 known. This, our readers will remember, was an accidental 

 circumstance, and happened in this wise. After many 

 fruitless exertions to secure an image upon a silver plate 

 treated with iodine, he was examining on one occasion some 

 of his plates, taken from a cupboard which served him in 

 the double capacity of laboratory and store-room, when to 

 his unbounded amazement he found a half-developed picture 

 upon one of them. His surprise was the greater from the 



