Daguerreotype

While still a student of medicine, just before he dropped out, Foucault discovered the work of Daguerre on photography. Louis-Jacques Daguerre (1787-1851) invented daguerreotypy, an early method of photography, in 1837. Daguerre had begun his work as an apprentice in architecture, but later moved to work on stage design in the theaters of Paris. He invented a theater of illusion called 'diorama': a picture show with changing light effects and large state-wide paintings used as background. Daguerre used a camera obscura as an aid in painting his theatrical back-ground pictures. This led him to the ideas of freezing the images, and he experimented with different methods of achieving this goal. One day in 1835, Daguerre by chance left an exposed plate in a cupboard in which there was a broken thermometer. The mercury fumes from the thermometer apparently reacted with the silver and other chemicals on the plate, and the image was set. Working on this process, Daguerre was able to develop his images in about thirty minutes.

On September 1839, Daguerre, who had obtained significant government support for his photography projects, organized a series of public demonstrations of his photographic process at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. The display of how photography works was such a success that Daguerre announced that France could not equip the entire world with the new apparatus for making photographs. He then turned the demonstrations of his new process into a free course to the public on photography, and the masses flocked to learn the new method of recording images. ~ Page 55 Excerpt: PENDULUM - Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Seience