August 19: The picture France gave to the world

On August 19, 1839, the French government in Paris gave Louis Daguerre's daguerreotype process "free to the world". Tonight's film: Looker (1981).

There is a kind of date that always stops me when I work on this almanac. The day a state does not just invent something, but gives it away on purpose. August 19, 1839 is one of those days. In Paris, at a joint session of the French Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, François Arago, the astronomer who had championed the inventor, publicly presented Louis Daguerre’s photographic process and, in the name of the French government, declared it a gift “free to the world”. No patent was filed. No license was asked for. It was simply handed over.

This was the daguerreotype. Daguerre, who began as a theater scene painter and co-proprietor of the Diorama, partnered with Nicéphore Niépce in 1829, the man who had already made the world’s first surviving photograph in 1826. Niépce died in 1833, and Daguerre spent years refining the chemistry. The process was this: a silver-plated copper sheet was sensitized with iodine vapor, exposed in a camera, developed over mercury fumes, and finally fixed with salt or sodium thiosulfate. The result was a single, unrepeatable, hair-thin-accurate image on a metal plate.

The French state bought the rights from Daguerre and from Niépce’s son Isidore, in exchange for lifetime annuities. Then it deliberately chose not to patent it. Within two years, portrait studios opened across Europe and America, and for roughly two decades the daguerreotype remained the dominant photographic medium. By 1850, New York City alone had more than 70 studios. For the first time, humanity could preserve itself as it actually looked.