Two different questions
“The first camera” can mean two things, and mixing them up causes most of the confusion. The first kind of camera is a dark box or room that projects an image, and that goes back to antiquity. The second is a camera that records the image permanently, which is a photographic camera, and that dates to the early nineteenth century. When people speak of the first camera, they usually mean the second, and the person most often named is the French inventor Nicephore Niepce.
Before Niepce: pictures that would not stay
In 1802 the English experimenters Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy published an account of making profiles and copies of paintings on paper and leather coated with silver nitrate. The images were produced by laying objects on the treated surface and exposing it to light. The pictures were never made permanent, and Davy noted they darkened if left in the light. Wedgwood is also reported to have tried to capture camera images, but the sensitivity of his materials was too low to produce a usable result.
These early failures are why the fixing problem, not the optics, was the real obstacle. The optical part, a dark box with a lens, had been available for centuries, and lenses came from the same workshops that made telescopes and early microscopes.
Niepce and the heliograph
Niepce was working in the same years that early railways were opening in England, a decade of rapid technical change, though his problem was chemical rather than mechanical. He lived in Burgundy and worked for years on ways to make light print images. His early work in the 1810s involved lithography, which led him to try to copy engravings using light, at a time when print shops depended on skilled engravers and lithographers for every picture. He also made images in a camera on paper treated with silver chloride around 1816, but the pictures were negatives that he could not fix.
His breakthrough, which he called heliography, or sun drawing, used a pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea, a naturally occurring asphalt, a relative of the substances later produced by petroleum refining. Under light, the bitumen hardens. After exposure, the unhardened areas were washed away with a solvent such as lavender oil mixed with petroleum, leaving a permanent image in which hardened bitumen formed the lighter tones.
The oldest surviving camera photograph made this way is a view from an upper window of his estate at Le Gras. It is usually dated to 1826 or 1827, and sources disagree, with 1826 or 1827 both appearing in reputable references. The exposure time is also uncertain. A commonly repeated figure is about eight hours, but later studies have suggested it could have been considerably longer, perhaps days. The plate was rediscovered by the historian Helmut Gernsheim in the early 1950s and is now held in the United States.
The camera itself
The apparatus Niepce used was a small wooden box with a lens fitted at one end and a slot for the plate at the other. He obtained lenses from a Paris optician. Because he did not produce a distinctive device that later became a standard design, it is difficult to point to a “first camera” as an object. What he demonstrated was that a camera obscura could be combined with a light-sensitive material to produce a lasting picture.
In 1829, Niepce entered a partnership with Louis Daguerre, a Paris showman and painter who ran a popular diorama theater. Niepce died in 1833, and Daguerre continued the work, eventually developing a different and more sensitive process.
Other claims
The story is more crowded than the usual single-inventor version suggests.
- Hercules Florence was a French-born artist living in Brazil. He experimented with light-sensitive materials in the 1830s and used the word “photographie,” and his notes have led some writers to argue that his priority has been overlooked. The extent of his results is debated.
- Hippolyte Bayard, a French civil servant, developed a direct positive paper process in 1839 and 1840. In 1840 he staged a self-portrait as a drowned man to protest that his work had received less support than Daguerre’s.
- William Henry Fox Talbot announced his paper process in January 1839 and later developed the negative-positive system that became the basis of most photography until the digital age.
- Daguerre received the public credit. The French government announced his process in 1839 and gave it to the world.
Each of these people had a claim to an important piece of the picture. The problem for historians is that “first” depends on whether a person is judged on date, durability, repeatability or influence.
Why the story is often forgotten
Niepce’s pictures were not practical. They needed very long exposures, the tones were rough, and only a few examples have survived. Daguerre’s more convenient process quickly overshadowed them, and Niepce’s role faded, partly because Daguerre’s name was attached to the public process. Niepce also did not live to see the announcement. Public memory, as often happens, favored the inventor who made the process work well enough to catch on.
A fair summary
If a short statement is needed, it is reasonable to say that Niepce made the first lasting photograph in a camera that survives, around 1826 or 1827, building on centuries of camera obscura use and on the failed light-copying attempts of others. It would be wrong to say that he invented photography alone, or that the precise first camera can be identified.