March 28, 2026 • 34 mins
This 2021 episode covers Louis Daguerre, who comes up almost any time we mention photography. Well before he figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura, he was an artist and innovator in entertainment.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
We're following up this week's episode on Elizabeth Fulham and
her connections to the world of photography with our episode
on Louis de Geer, inventor of the Deaghera type. This
episode originally came out December twenty seventh, twenty twenty one.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(00:24):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. You have probably
noticed that there's a name that pops up pretty much
anytime we're discussing photography in history, and that is de
(00:45):
gear We have referenced him and his Deaghera types and
the invention of that many times on the show, and
we often use it as a reference point for when
other people are taking pictures and how far along they've come.
We're probably going to reference it again. He really innovated
and touched a lot of lives. But well before he
figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura,
(01:08):
he was an artist and an innovator in entertainment. So
today we are going to talk about all of that
because you've never covered him before, and of course we
will also talk about his work in photography. He's one
of those people that has come up so many times
that we had to have the conversation about whether we
had already done this episode.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yes, Tracy, are you sure we haven't covered to Gueret.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I just looked through the whole spreadsheet, not in there.
So He was born Louis Jacques Monde Dauguerre on November eighteenth,
seventeen eighty seven, about one hundred and eighty kilometers west
of Paris, in a town called Corme on Persi. The family,
especially to Gere's father, who was named Louis. They were
(01:50):
royalists in their politics, and Louis had a sister who
even was named after Marie Antoinette. That sister was born
in seventeen ninety one. The senior Louis de guer worked
as a court crier before the revolution, and that was
a civil service job. But as the French Revolution really
hated up, that job of course went away for a while.
(02:13):
That meant that the family moved to Orleans, where Louis
senior found work as a clerk in an estate, and
in seventeen ninety three, of course, Louis the sixteenth was
guillotined and the reign of terror began. Degare's father was
employed by Louis Philippe, the second Duke d'Orleans, who sided
with the revolution, but he was of course a cousin
(02:34):
of the king, and he was eventually guillotined for his
association with the House of Bourbon, and though Louis da
guer senior remained employed at the estate, this seems to
have pretty much meant that life in Orleans was a
little bit more somber than it had been when the
family first arrived there. There are some holes in the
(02:55):
story of Degaer's early life. Some of that is just
because it would have been an usual for just a
regular child's life to be well documented, but it's also
because of the period in which he was born. So consider,
for example, he would have still been basically a baby,
not even two years old, when the Bastille was stormed
in seventeen eighty nine, so his whole childhood was happening
(03:17):
at a time when the monarchy was falling, the revolution
was raging. That all would have been very difficult for
his royalist father, and it also would have meant that
a lot of just so called normal life was significantly disrupted.
So we know that Louis Daguerre was enrolled in public
school in Orleans, but due to those constantly shifting sands
(03:40):
of the French government, there were stretches, long stretches sometimes
where classes did not assemble, So Dager got something of
a patchwork education. But he spent that ample free time
that he was afforded by the gaps in school to
develop his natural talent, which was drawing. While Louis de
Guerre's name is forever linked to photography, he really did
(04:03):
not start out on a career path that would suggest
that outcome. In eighteen hundred, Louis de Guerre drew a
portrait of his parents. This was sort of an audition.
The skill that he exhibited with this portrait led to
him being offered an apprenticeship, not exactly with an artist,
though it was with an architect. This was a stable
(04:23):
career path for an artistic thirteen year old in a
time when France really did not have that many stable
career paths. So for three years he dutifully worked at
perfecting his ability to render the drawings of building structures.
That's something he seems to have really enjoyed. He loved
recreating true life detail in his drawing, and architectural drawings
(04:46):
were to him just another iteration of that. Now, as
a note, this is something that I stumbled across a
lot while researching this episode. You will sometimes see it
mentioned in biographical writeups of de Guer that he also
he worked as a revenue officer during this early period
of his life, without much additional information about it, And
(05:07):
it kind of seems like this might actually be the
result of some confusion due to his name being the
same as his father's, and since we know that his
father did work as a clerk at an estate, that
kind of seems like the most likely scenario.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
When the younger Louis.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
De Guer finished his apprenticeship at the age of sixteen,
he didn't take the next step into architecture. Instead, he
went back to his love of art. He decided to
move to Paris to study painting and to try to
make a life as an artist. This was something that
his parents found terrifying. They had supported his artistic tendencies,
(05:42):
but there was just uncertainty and a lack of stability
in an art career. And then, on top of that
they were also concerned that the young de Geer would
fall into a life of debauchery in Paris. Finally, after
a lot of discussion, they made an arrangement that was
agreeable to the parents and the son alike. Louis's father
got him an apprenticeship in Paris with Ignacio Eugeno Maria
(06:06):
Degotti and Degotti was born and touring Italy in seventeen
fifty eight, and like young Luis de Guar, he showed
artistic proclivity from a very young age, and he too
had moved to Paris to pursue his art, although he
did so when he was in his thirties, and by
the time his life met up with Deguere's he had
become a renowned theatrical designer and a painter for the
(06:28):
Paris Opera, and de Guer moved in with him as
part of this apprenticeship deal that was something his parents
insisted upon. This was a time in his life when
Louis de Geer lived a pretty enviable existence. He was young,
he was making connections in the Paris art scene, and
he made the most of that. There are stories about
how much fun he was at parties and how he
(06:50):
would go into such gatherings walking on his hands. He
loved Paris, and Paris loved him back. He was really
beloved among his peers. At one point he even appeared
on stage in a small role in the Paris Opera. Yeah,
there was one section of a biography about him I
was reading where it said that he knew how to
walk a tightrope and that he may have learned this
(07:13):
when he was a young boy, because festivals would come
through the area where they lived. And I'm like, yes,
but how did that come up? While he's just hanging
out with this friend's like, oh, would you like to
see me? What walk this tightrope that just happens to
be here at present? That's a little less clear, But
he had a lot of fun skills, it sounds like.
(07:34):
And just as he had spent three years as an
architect's apprentice, he spent three years under Degatti's tutelage before
deciding that he wanted to move on. And this was
a pretty natural progression because his next move was to
take on an assistant ship with another artist, and this
time it was Pierre Prevost, famed panorama painter. Panoramas are
(07:56):
enormous paintings. They were mounted in circular rooms intended to
be viewed from a central viewing platform. They had made
their debut in London in seventeen ninety three, and then
Paris had quickly embraced this medium, and Provost really excelled
at creating deeply detailed vistas that captured the attention of visitors.
(08:17):
He didn't do all this on his own. He had
a team of assistants who worked with him, and that
is where de Geer fit in. In addition to being
an apparently delightful party guest, de Geer was also a
really hard worker. Yeah, he did not ever shirk his work,
and moreover, he seemed to have an attitude of like,
I will learn everything I can from my mentors, and
(08:40):
he really applied himself in every position he was in
by all reports, in eighteen ten, while de Gerre was
still working for Provost and he was twenty three at
the time, he married the twenty year old Louise Georgina Aerosmith.
Her name is English just because her parents were English,
although she was born and raised in France, and these
two were very much love. This was a love match,
(09:01):
and when Louise's brother had a child out of wedlock.
The de geers raised her as their own daughter. Her
name was Marguerite Felicity. After almost ten years working under
Provost de Gear was offered and accepted a new job
that was chief painter at the Theater de la Bigu Comique.
In that job, De Gear elevated the production significantly. He
(09:24):
didn't just create backdrops that were far superior to what
the theater had before, he also introduced a new way
to use them through lighting design. He devised systems of
lighting effects to create convincing moonlight scenes, and when it
came time to stage the eruption of Mount Etna in
a play titled Le Belvidere, Degear created a sensation with
(09:45):
his lighting design. This spurred ticket sales for the theater.
He became so recognized as an asset for the theater
that the Paris Opera wanted to hire him, so for
a couple of years he was designing the scenery for
both of those at the same time. Time. Yeah, this
is such a striking development because again, remember right like
(10:07):
they're doing all of this manually and at a time
when it was like night has fallen and all of
the lights would be blown out or all of the
windows closed. He was like, no, no, what if we
find a way to do this subtly, which was a
complete shift. So all of this and working for these
two theater houses at the same time kept Louis very busy,
(10:27):
but he still had time to think of new projects,
and in eighteen twenty one he partnered with an old
friend and colleague who had worked as an assistant to
Pierre Prevost at the same time that de Geer had.
That was a man named Charles Murie Button, and the
two men had a plan to launch a new entertainment
venture that built on their knowledge of panorama painting and
(10:49):
incorporated the lighting expertise that de gear had acquired through
his theater work. The two men set up a limited
stock company and they leased a plot of land and
they sold shares to investors fund their project. On July eleventh,
eighteen twenty two, Bouton and daguerre opened the Paris Diorama.
This scenographic entertainment was something completely new That two had
(11:11):
to design a theater to house and display what they
were working on. It had large scale images in common
with the panorama, but it offered entirely new spectacles for
audiences to witness, and we're going to talk more about
what the diorama was and how it was received in
just a moment, but first we'll pause for a quick
sponsor break. So in the diorama, scenes like landscapes and
(11:45):
architectural views were painted in large scale for audience viewing,
but in this version they were painted on linen so
they would be translucent. Then lighting effects were used to
bring the painting seemingly to life before the viewer's eyes.
This was again, remember before electrical current was used in
buildings by a number of decades, so Dagare had designed
(12:07):
the theater to make use of natural light. There were
windows and skylights around the theater that had shutters which
could be operated manually to great effect. To add to
the illusion, there were sound effects. Sometimes there would be
an actor to fill out the image in a three
dimensional way. There wasn't any story in play for these scenes.
(12:28):
It was just the magical illusion of feeling like you
were sitting in a meadow by a mountainside, or standing
near a brook, or looking out over the interior of
Canterbury Cathedral from a high up gallery. These scenes would
last for ten or fifteen minutes, and then a massive
turntable would rotate the image away and bring a second
one into view that would be similarly animated with light
(12:51):
and other effects. Both the public and critics really raved
over the diorama. Some were said to have been reluctant
to accept that they had been looked looking at a
two dimensional image that whole time.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
There was allegedly one woman who asked to be led
down the steps of the cathedral and they're like, they're
not there. Uh. In less than a year, the business
had made back the money that it had cost to
open it and to operate it, and it started to
turn a profit. The next obvious step was to open
a second location, and that second one was in Regent's Park, London.
(13:26):
Because this had been a proven success already in Paris,
Bouton and de Guerre had no trouble finding investors for
their second theater, and when it opened, it was covered
extensively in the British press. On September twenty ninth, eighteen
twenty three, the Morning Chronicle of London ran a story
that was simply titled the Diorama. It read quote the
(13:47):
diorama which has long been an object of wonder and
delight at Paris is at length established in this metropolis.
A spacious building has been expressly constructed for this exhibition
in that part of the new Road which adjoins Portland Place,
at an expense which is said to have exceeded ten
thousand pounds, And on Saturday a select number of visitors
(14:09):
was admitted to a private inspection previous to it being
opened to the public on this day. There was also
an assurance in the write up to potential visitors that
this was definitely a very different thing than the panoramas,
which had been popular in London for years at that point.
It read quote the diorama differs in this respect from
the panorama that, instead of a circular view of the
(14:32):
objects represented, the whole picture is seen at once in perspective.
But it differs from it still more essentially in the
extraordinary fidelity with which the objects are depicted, and in
the completeness of the optical illusion. Later on, after describing
pretty much every corner of the theater in detail, the
journalist writes, quote, in the diorama, every thing contributes to
(14:56):
favor the illusion. The skill of the artist is the
first thing which strikes us in the panorama and the
last in the diorama. Both de Geer and Bhutan were
made knights in the French Legion of Honor by Louis
the eighteenth Many dioramas popped up in Europe and in
North America after their success in Paris and in London.
These were run by other operators who were hoping to
(15:18):
cash in on the popularity of the medium, but the
original partners kept developing shows in only their two theaters,
and while the diorama business was still growing, De gear
had begun to conduct experiments in image capture As early
as eighteen twenty four. He had set up a lab
in the basement of the Paris Diorama building so that
(15:39):
he could pursue his fascination with the field of photography,
although it was of course not called that yet. It
didn't get that name until eighteen thirty nine. He just
knew he was trying to capture light and use it
to replicate the imagery of the world around him. He
did not seem to know that a lot of other
men had already been doing the same thing for quite
a while, with no real success. It makes sense that
(16:02):
after creating the Diorama, De gear would feel driven to
find a new level of realism to keep audiences buying tickets.
Part of his drive was probably the realization that Bhutan
wasn't really interested in staying with the diorama long term.
Degher knew the success of the business was totally up
to him. Additionally, the business had a lot of overhead.
(16:24):
Every time a new scene was staged had to be
created from scratch, and that was expensive. But if de
Geer didn't keep new images rotating in audiences would just
stop coming. He eventually sold off his interest in the
London location just to keep his finances afloat, and according
to friends and acquaintances, none of whom were allowed to
(16:46):
see what he was up to. He was completely obsessed
with his secret project. His beloved wife Louise brought him food,
but even she was not allowed into the lab. He sometimes,
again according to friends, went for two to three days
without leaving that lab, often for going sleep for unhealthy
long stretches as he worked. He had been familiar with
(17:08):
the camera obscura for a while For a refresher. This
is a dark chamber, either a room or a box
that has a tiny hole to allow light in through
that hole, an image of whatever is outside of the
chamber is projected onto the opposite wall inverted camera obscura,
which means dark chamber in Latin, is a concept that's
(17:29):
been around since antiquity, so this was not a new
technology when Degear was alive, but he thought that somehow
it could be used not just to project images, but
also to capture the light somehow. Because Degear didn't really
document what he was doing, but also he probably didn't
really know what he was doing to be able to
(17:51):
put it into words, we don't have a lot of
information about how this whole thing played out for him.
There were certainly experiments being done by other men using
chemistry to try to create images with light, including the
work of people like Jacques Charles, who figured out that
you could capture a person's silhouette on paper by treating
the paper with light sensitive chemicals and then projecting the
(18:12):
person's shadow onto it. But even Charles's images were temporary.
The entire paper would eventually darken because it had been treated.
The use of chemical processes was also probably pretty challenging
for Degear thanks to his inconsistent education in his early years.
He really just did not have a command of chemistry
(18:33):
to start from, but he did have access to optics
expertise and the associated equipment thanks to his friend Charles Chevalier.
The Chevalier family business was in producing various scientific equipment,
including lenses, so at least in that area, de Geer
had a very steady supply. It was through Chevalier that
(18:53):
de Geer made a crucial connection that would finally give
him a breakthrough. Nissfort Nips, his cousin, to Chevalier's shop
to purchase a camera obscurra. Nissi Fournipps had been working
on a process to create pictures using sunlight since the
eighteen teens. He had used a camera to create a
(19:14):
heliograph with bitumen on paper in eighteen twenty six, but
that had needed eight hours of exposure to work. Even
with that eight hours, it was kind of gauzy and
faded in appearance, so he was trying to improve on that.
When he asked about a new camera obscura, Charles Chevalier
(19:34):
got Nip's address, gave it to Louis de Gear, who
in turn reached out to Nips.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Via a letter.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Both of these men were a bit cautious. Initially, de
Gear did not want to risk any potential business interest
by giving away what he had been working on, and
Niepps was not entirely clear who Degear was or how
he had gotten his address, and this letter out of
the blue seemed kind of rude and suspicious to him.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
It was very forward.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
It would be like if a stranger called you, Tracy
and went like, hey, can I have your research log
ins at the following three places? Yeah, and you would
be like him, excuse considering my response when I get
unsolicited pr pitches to a personal email address that I've
never publicized, I totally get this reaction.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
So the reply that Niepp sent was brief and it
merely confirmed that, yes, he had been doing some experiments.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Along the lines of what de Gear was asking about.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
It took Degher months to reply, but when he did,
he once again offended Niepps by asking for a sample
of his experiments. Nips knew that de Geer was the
man behind the popular diorama, so he started asking acquaintances
in Paris if they knew him. He found that Degere
had a reputation in the art world for his talent
and his work with light, but Niepps still only wrote
(20:53):
him a short reply without a sample. He said that
he thought they were on different paths. He's so polite
he wouldn't leave it unanswered, but he was kind of like, hey,
go with God, but uh, I'm doing something else, whether
out of genuine interest or just desperation. De Gear wrote
him once more, and this time he actually sent along
(21:15):
a sample of his own work, but he didn't know
that Nieps had also reached a sort of breaking point
where the family money was running out. He had spent
a lot on this effort, and he too was hitting
a dead end and not progressing any farther. He still
thought Degear might not be trustworthy, but he did reach
out with the suggestion that quote it should be of
(21:36):
mutual interest to reciprocate our efforts to attain the goal,
and he sent a sample which de Gear sent him
a pretty scathing critique of These two men finally had
a meeting in Paris in eighteen twenty seven. Understandably, they
remained pretty tentative with one another. Each was concerned that
he was lagging behind the other, but Niepp's described having
(21:59):
a pretty girl great time with the Gear, who had
given him a tour of the diorama. There was another
gap in their exchange due to the illness and death
of Niepp's brother, Claude, but eventually the two of them
were writing to one another with regularity. It was not
until autumn of eighteen twenty nine that the two officially
entered into a partnership, which had a ten year contract.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
So we're going to.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Talk about some of the details of Niepps's progress in
image capture. After we first pause and hear from the sponsors.
They keep stuff you missed in history class going in
his work, Niepps had coated a paper with silver chloride
(22:43):
to capture an image from his studio window of the
landscape outside.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
This is what he called heliography.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Eventually he made a more permanent image from that same window,
this time on a pewter plate. He wanted to make
a printable plate, and he had also managed to reproduce
an engraved portrait with his process and make two prints
from it. De Geer traveled to visit Nipp's and learned
about how he had progressed, and he took all of
the information he learned back to Paris so that he
(23:10):
could do more experiments. But then in eighteen thirty, everything
got complicated. The Diorama was in financial trouble, but Tom
finally left the business entirely, and the July Revolution, in
which Charles the tenth was deposed and King Louis Philippe
took on the Throat took the throne. That left France
in a tense time when letters that talked about something
(23:32):
like chemicals could easily be misconstrued as some kind of
revolutionary correspondence, so de Guer and Niepp stopped communicating. Things
were so financially tenuous that de Guer wrote to the
crown to ask for a promotion to officer in the
Legion of Honor. The thinking was that that would come
with a financial payment that would help to keep him
from his own financial ruin. But in the time that
(23:55):
he had free from working on the Diorama to try
to keep that going, Deguer learned Niepp's method of capturing images.
He wanted to see if he had any ideas for
how to move it forward. He and Yips were writing
to each other in codes so they could keep collaborating.
This was really a frantic time. De Gear declared bankruptcy
in March of eighteen thirty two, but he and Nips
(24:17):
kept working. Yeah. Eventually they came up with a list
where they gave chemical's number assignments and they each had it,
so they would just like use numbers in their letters,
which to me would look like a suspicious code that words.
So Nipps had used a bitumen coding that hardened when
exposed to light for some of his experiments, and de
(24:39):
Gear came up with a variation on that idea that
used distilled lavender oil to improve on the heliograph. That
lavender oil left a white residue in areas of the
image where light had hit it, and that created an
improved image than they had had before that the duo
called a faizototype. This was an improvement, but it wasn't
really a breakthrough, not at the level they needed, so
(25:01):
they kept working. I like to think that this smelled
really nice, I hope, so if nothing else, they could
say the studio smelled beautiful.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
So Degear shifted his work back to using silver salts
instead of a resin based image capture. There's an apocryphal
story about how he got to his next breakthrough. In it,
he had accidentally left a spoon on an iodized plate,
and then later realized that a perfect shadow of the
spoon had been created on the plate when the light
(25:32):
hit it. So he started to purposefully sensitize the silver
on the plates that they were using. He did this
with iodine fumes. The Gear is said to have shared
this story verbally throughout his life, but he never wrote
it down. We don't really know how accurate it is. Yeah,
there are some questions about how much that story may
have changed in the tellings. Initially, Degear's work with iodine
(25:55):
to sensitize plates did not really return results. But he
never got to share his frustration about this with Nips
because Nisifor died suddenly in July eighteen thirty three after
having a stroke, and this left de Gear without the
scientific expertise of his collaborator. But once again he was
tenacious and he kept at the work, and an accident
(26:17):
is again said to have given him the next advancement.
Degere is said to have placed one of his polished
silver coated plates into a cupboard after having exposed it
in a camera obscura. The cupboard was a light proof
chemical cupboard that was intended for storing exposed plates but
he noticed when he returned to the place roughly half
(26:38):
an hour later, the image that he had exposed in
the camera obscura had already developed. A thermometer had broken
in the cupboard, and Luis de Gher realized that mercury
vapor was speeding the development. Yeah, again, this is apocryphal,
so in some versions of it you'll see that he
left it overnight, frustrated that it had not initially developed. Regardless,
(27:00):
this was a huge step forward, but the process was
still not solid, and that is mostly because the images
themselves were not. Permanence of those images remained a problem.
Those plates would just keep developing over time and the
image would be lost, so they would just like keep
having more details until they just became a big blob. Eventually,
(27:23):
Degear figured that problem out as well. It was merely
a matter of stopping the developing process by removing the
excess silver iodide from the plate. Degear used a salt
solution of sodium thiosulfate to do this. So the system
for making what would be called a Dagera type was
one polish a silver coated copper plate, two sensitize the
(27:45):
plate with iodine fumes, and place it in a light
tight plate. Three, slide that plate into the camera obscura
and then slide the light type covering open. Four expose
that for some number of minutes, and that was variable
depending on the light and the camera obscura and the
concentration of the chemicals that were used. So this required
(28:06):
some experience and know how of the person who was
trying to make the image. Step five develop the image
in mercury vapor and step six stop the development process
with AsSalt based solution. The first public mention of Degear's
work actually appeared in eighteen thirty five, so several years before.
Like the big release about it, that wasn't an article
(28:29):
in the Journal des Artiste, that was about new shows
at the Diorama, It wasn't about image capture at all.
But at the end of the write up, which had
no attribution as to its author and has even made
some people question whether maybe Deguer wrote this himself, there
was the following paragraph quote he has discovered, we are
told the means of collecting on a plate prepared by him,
(28:52):
the image produced by a camera obscura in such a
way that a portrait, a landscape, or any view projected
on this plate by an ordinary camera obscura leaves its
impression in light and shade, and this presents the most
perfect of all drawings. A preparation applied to this image
preserves it for an indefinite time. Physical science has perhaps
(29:14):
never presented a wonder comparable to this one. This was
a considerable announcement, but nothing much seems to have been
said about it for the entire year. But then architect
Alphonse Eugene Hubert wrote a response that amounted to basically,
I seriously doubt it. He had been trying to capture
camera obscure images as well, but had not had any luck,
(29:38):
so to him, it seemed highly unlikely that de Geer,
who did not have a scientific background, could have managed it.
By eighteen thirty seven, de Geer had tested and replicated
his process enough times that it was set he could
always get consistent results. As with other aspects of his
work that we don't really know what that process of
(29:58):
testing and refinement was like. We have no idea, truly
no idea the manner in which he arrived at realizing
each step along the way was the correct one. We
do know his process was different from all of the
other photographic processes that were in development by other people
that were having problems. The Academy of Sciences heard a
(30:18):
presentation that laid out exactly how de Geer's process worked
on January seventh, eighteen thirty nine. That lecture was not
given by de Geer, but by Francois Arago. De Gear
couldn't do it. He had felt ill, or at least
he claimed he did. We don't know he at least
he said he felt ill. He may have had nerves,
(30:38):
and that is why an astronomer first explained photography at
the Academy of Sciences. But to Gear had decided to
name this process after himself, of course, and that was
something that really bothered Nissophornief's son Isidore, who felt that
his father should really be recognized. But to Gear really
thought that he had changed the approach so much from
(31:00):
the heliograph works that Niepps had done that the name
shift was warranted. An In a revised version of the
contract that he had originally agreed to you with Niepps,
Degear offered his former partner's family financial rights to half
of the money made from Deghera typing, and the promise
that Niepps's name would always be included in formal announcements.
(31:21):
Isadore Niepps signed this new deal. In terms of making
money from this work, Louis de Gher took an interesting approach.
He knew from his experience with the diorama that imitators
would pop up as soon as he filed for a patent,
and in France at the time, there was really not
much that could be done about it, so instead he
sold it to the French government, and in turn, the
(31:43):
French government released it free to the world as a
gift on August nineteenth, eighteen thirty nine. As part of
the sale to the government, de Geer had arranged for
annual payments to be made to both himself and Nieps's family.
Degere got six thousand francs a year and nips As
got four thousand. The gear did manage to patent his
(32:04):
process in England, Ireland and Scotland before the French government
released it, so he maintained his rights there and in
their colonies. Yeah, he did try for a while some
other business sort of plans to try and make money
off of this, but none of those were really working out,
which is why he sold it to the government. As
(32:24):
the Dagheera type took on a life of its own
and the field of photography continued to advance through other
inventors improving upon it, da Gear retired again.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
He was financially set.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
A fire destroyed a lot of his early work in
eighteen thirty nine, and he did not rebuild his burnt
studio after that. He did give some presentations and lessons
on occasion, but according to most people, he was actually
kind of shy, particularly about talking about his achievement, and
all he really wanted to do was go back to painting,
and he did a lot of that in his later years.
(32:56):
During the eighteen forties, he painted a number of huge
pieces churches in Paris. Louis de Guerret died of a
heart attack on July tenth, eighteen fifty one, at his
home in Brisumern, just outside of Paris. In the time
between the announcement of the da gettype and his death,
other innovators had come up with new ways to capture
imagery with light. That included William Henry Fox Talbot, who
(33:20):
patented a paper negative process, the Cali type in eighteen
forty one. The garrottype studios opened in Europe and the
United States, and two photography journals were launched in the US.
They were the Dagarian Art Journal and the Photographic Art Journal.
And then, immediately before his death, starting in May of
eighteen fifty one, a Dagherot type exhibition had been mounted
(33:42):
at the Great Exhibition of London.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Which is another thing that comes up a lot.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Also, Hey, surprise, this is the first of a sort
of two parter that we're doing on early photography. They
are stand the Loan episodes, but they're linked thematically, and
on an upcoming episode we are going to discuss one
of the people who took Degear's new technology kind of
ran with it.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Oh, Louis Decade.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
We're following up this week's episode on Elizabeth Fulham and
her connections to the world of photography with our episode
on Louis de Geer, inventor of the Deaghera type. This
episode originally came out December twenty seventh, twenty twenty one.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(00:24):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. You have probably
noticed that there's a name that pops up pretty much
anytime we're discussing photography in history, and that is de
(00:45):
gear We have referenced him and his Deaghera types and
the invention of that many times on the show, and
we often use it as a reference point for when
other people are taking pictures and how far along they've come.
We're probably going to reference it again. He really innovated
and touched a lot of lives. But well before he
figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura,
(01:08):
he was an artist and an innovator in entertainment. So
today we are going to talk about all of that
because you've never covered him before, and of course we
will also talk about his work in photography. He's one
of those people that has come up so many times
that we had to have the conversation about whether we
had already done this episode.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yes, Tracy, are you sure we haven't covered to Gueret.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I just looked through the whole spreadsheet, not in there.
So He was born Louis Jacques Monde Dauguerre on November eighteenth,
seventeen eighty seven, about one hundred and eighty kilometers west
of Paris, in a town called Corme on Persi. The family,
especially to Gere's father, who was named Louis. They were
(01:50):
royalists in their politics, and Louis had a sister who
even was named after Marie Antoinette. That sister was born
in seventeen ninety one. The senior Louis de guer worked
as a court crier before the revolution, and that was
a civil service job. But as the French Revolution really
hated up, that job of course went away for a while.
(02:13):
That meant that the family moved to Orleans, where Louis
senior found work as a clerk in an estate, and
in seventeen ninety three, of course, Louis the sixteenth was
guillotined and the reign of terror began. Degare's father was
employed by Louis Philippe, the second Duke d'Orleans, who sided
with the revolution, but he was of course a cousin
(02:34):
of the king, and he was eventually guillotined for his
association with the House of Bourbon, and though Louis da
guer senior remained employed at the estate, this seems to
have pretty much meant that life in Orleans was a
little bit more somber than it had been when the
family first arrived there. There are some holes in the
(02:55):
story of Degaer's early life. Some of that is just
because it would have been an usual for just a
regular child's life to be well documented, but it's also
because of the period in which he was born. So consider,
for example, he would have still been basically a baby,
not even two years old, when the Bastille was stormed
in seventeen eighty nine, so his whole childhood was happening
(03:17):
at a time when the monarchy was falling, the revolution
was raging. That all would have been very difficult for
his royalist father, and it also would have meant that
a lot of just so called normal life was significantly disrupted.
So we know that Louis Daguerre was enrolled in public
school in Orleans, but due to those constantly shifting sands
(03:40):
of the French government, there were stretches, long stretches sometimes
where classes did not assemble, So Dager got something of
a patchwork education. But he spent that ample free time
that he was afforded by the gaps in school to
develop his natural talent, which was drawing. While Louis de
Guerre's name is forever linked to photography, he really did
(04:03):
not start out on a career path that would suggest
that outcome. In eighteen hundred, Louis de Guerre drew a
portrait of his parents. This was sort of an audition.
The skill that he exhibited with this portrait led to
him being offered an apprenticeship, not exactly with an artist,
though it was with an architect. This was a stable
(04:23):
career path for an artistic thirteen year old in a
time when France really did not have that many stable
career paths. So for three years he dutifully worked at
perfecting his ability to render the drawings of building structures.
That's something he seems to have really enjoyed. He loved
recreating true life detail in his drawing, and architectural drawings
(04:46):
were to him just another iteration of that. Now, as
a note, this is something that I stumbled across a
lot while researching this episode. You will sometimes see it
mentioned in biographical writeups of de Guer that he also
he worked as a revenue officer during this early period
of his life, without much additional information about it, And
(05:07):
it kind of seems like this might actually be the
result of some confusion due to his name being the
same as his father's, and since we know that his
father did work as a clerk at an estate, that
kind of seems like the most likely scenario.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
When the younger Louis.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
De Guer finished his apprenticeship at the age of sixteen,
he didn't take the next step into architecture. Instead, he
went back to his love of art. He decided to
move to Paris to study painting and to try to
make a life as an artist. This was something that
his parents found terrifying. They had supported his artistic tendencies,
(05:42):
but there was just uncertainty and a lack of stability
in an art career. And then, on top of that
they were also concerned that the young de Geer would
fall into a life of debauchery in Paris. Finally, after
a lot of discussion, they made an arrangement that was
agreeable to the parents and the son alike. Louis's father
got him an apprenticeship in Paris with Ignacio Eugeno Maria
(06:06):
Degotti and Degotti was born and touring Italy in seventeen
fifty eight, and like young Luis de Guar, he showed
artistic proclivity from a very young age, and he too
had moved to Paris to pursue his art, although he
did so when he was in his thirties, and by
the time his life met up with Deguere's he had
become a renowned theatrical designer and a painter for the
(06:28):
Paris Opera, and de Guer moved in with him as
part of this apprenticeship deal that was something his parents
insisted upon. This was a time in his life when
Louis de Geer lived a pretty enviable existence. He was young,
he was making connections in the Paris art scene, and
he made the most of that. There are stories about
how much fun he was at parties and how he
(06:50):
would go into such gatherings walking on his hands. He
loved Paris, and Paris loved him back. He was really
beloved among his peers. At one point he even appeared
on stage in a small role in the Paris Opera. Yeah,
there was one section of a biography about him I
was reading where it said that he knew how to
walk a tightrope and that he may have learned this
(07:13):
when he was a young boy, because festivals would come
through the area where they lived. And I'm like, yes,
but how did that come up? While he's just hanging
out with this friend's like, oh, would you like to
see me? What walk this tightrope that just happens to
be here at present? That's a little less clear, But
he had a lot of fun skills, it sounds like.
(07:34):
And just as he had spent three years as an
architect's apprentice, he spent three years under Degatti's tutelage before
deciding that he wanted to move on. And this was
a pretty natural progression because his next move was to
take on an assistant ship with another artist, and this
time it was Pierre Prevost, famed panorama painter. Panoramas are
(07:56):
enormous paintings. They were mounted in circular rooms intended to
be viewed from a central viewing platform. They had made
their debut in London in seventeen ninety three, and then
Paris had quickly embraced this medium, and Provost really excelled
at creating deeply detailed vistas that captured the attention of visitors.
(08:17):
He didn't do all this on his own. He had
a team of assistants who worked with him, and that
is where de Geer fit in. In addition to being
an apparently delightful party guest, de Geer was also a
really hard worker. Yeah, he did not ever shirk his work,
and moreover, he seemed to have an attitude of like,
I will learn everything I can from my mentors, and
(08:40):
he really applied himself in every position he was in
by all reports, in eighteen ten, while de Gerre was
still working for Provost and he was twenty three at
the time, he married the twenty year old Louise Georgina Aerosmith.
Her name is English just because her parents were English,
although she was born and raised in France, and these
two were very much love. This was a love match,
(09:01):
and when Louise's brother had a child out of wedlock.
The de geers raised her as their own daughter. Her
name was Marguerite Felicity. After almost ten years working under
Provost de Gear was offered and accepted a new job
that was chief painter at the Theater de la Bigu Comique.
In that job, De Gear elevated the production significantly. He
(09:24):
didn't just create backdrops that were far superior to what
the theater had before, he also introduced a new way
to use them through lighting design. He devised systems of
lighting effects to create convincing moonlight scenes, and when it
came time to stage the eruption of Mount Etna in
a play titled Le Belvidere, Degear created a sensation with
(09:45):
his lighting design. This spurred ticket sales for the theater.
He became so recognized as an asset for the theater
that the Paris Opera wanted to hire him, so for
a couple of years he was designing the scenery for
both of those at the same time. Time. Yeah, this
is such a striking development because again, remember right like
(10:07):
they're doing all of this manually and at a time
when it was like night has fallen and all of
the lights would be blown out or all of the
windows closed. He was like, no, no, what if we
find a way to do this subtly, which was a
complete shift. So all of this and working for these
two theater houses at the same time kept Louis very busy,
(10:27):
but he still had time to think of new projects,
and in eighteen twenty one he partnered with an old
friend and colleague who had worked as an assistant to
Pierre Prevost at the same time that de Geer had.
That was a man named Charles Murie Button, and the
two men had a plan to launch a new entertainment
venture that built on their knowledge of panorama painting and
(10:49):
incorporated the lighting expertise that de gear had acquired through
his theater work. The two men set up a limited
stock company and they leased a plot of land and
they sold shares to investors fund their project. On July eleventh,
eighteen twenty two, Bouton and daguerre opened the Paris Diorama.
This scenographic entertainment was something completely new That two had
(11:11):
to design a theater to house and display what they
were working on. It had large scale images in common
with the panorama, but it offered entirely new spectacles for
audiences to witness, and we're going to talk more about
what the diorama was and how it was received in
just a moment, but first we'll pause for a quick
sponsor break. So in the diorama, scenes like landscapes and
(11:45):
architectural views were painted in large scale for audience viewing,
but in this version they were painted on linen so
they would be translucent. Then lighting effects were used to
bring the painting seemingly to life before the viewer's eyes.
This was again, remember before electrical current was used in
buildings by a number of decades, so Dagare had designed
(12:07):
the theater to make use of natural light. There were
windows and skylights around the theater that had shutters which
could be operated manually to great effect. To add to
the illusion, there were sound effects. Sometimes there would be
an actor to fill out the image in a three
dimensional way. There wasn't any story in play for these scenes.
(12:28):
It was just the magical illusion of feeling like you
were sitting in a meadow by a mountainside, or standing
near a brook, or looking out over the interior of
Canterbury Cathedral from a high up gallery. These scenes would
last for ten or fifteen minutes, and then a massive
turntable would rotate the image away and bring a second
one into view that would be similarly animated with light
(12:51):
and other effects. Both the public and critics really raved
over the diorama. Some were said to have been reluctant
to accept that they had been looked looking at a
two dimensional image that whole time.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
There was allegedly one woman who asked to be led
down the steps of the cathedral and they're like, they're
not there. Uh. In less than a year, the business
had made back the money that it had cost to
open it and to operate it, and it started to
turn a profit. The next obvious step was to open
a second location, and that second one was in Regent's Park, London.
(13:26):
Because this had been a proven success already in Paris,
Bouton and de Guerre had no trouble finding investors for
their second theater, and when it opened, it was covered
extensively in the British press. On September twenty ninth, eighteen
twenty three, the Morning Chronicle of London ran a story
that was simply titled the Diorama. It read quote the
(13:47):
diorama which has long been an object of wonder and
delight at Paris is at length established in this metropolis.
A spacious building has been expressly constructed for this exhibition
in that part of the new Road which adjoins Portland Place,
at an expense which is said to have exceeded ten
thousand pounds, And on Saturday a select number of visitors
(14:09):
was admitted to a private inspection previous to it being
opened to the public on this day. There was also
an assurance in the write up to potential visitors that
this was definitely a very different thing than the panoramas,
which had been popular in London for years at that point.
It read quote the diorama differs in this respect from
the panorama that, instead of a circular view of the
(14:32):
objects represented, the whole picture is seen at once in perspective.
But it differs from it still more essentially in the
extraordinary fidelity with which the objects are depicted, and in
the completeness of the optical illusion. Later on, after describing
pretty much every corner of the theater in detail, the
journalist writes, quote, in the diorama, every thing contributes to
(14:56):
favor the illusion. The skill of the artist is the
first thing which strikes us in the panorama and the
last in the diorama. Both de Geer and Bhutan were
made knights in the French Legion of Honor by Louis
the eighteenth Many dioramas popped up in Europe and in
North America after their success in Paris and in London.
These were run by other operators who were hoping to
(15:18):
cash in on the popularity of the medium, but the
original partners kept developing shows in only their two theaters,
and while the diorama business was still growing, De gear
had begun to conduct experiments in image capture As early
as eighteen twenty four. He had set up a lab
in the basement of the Paris Diorama building so that
(15:39):
he could pursue his fascination with the field of photography,
although it was of course not called that yet. It
didn't get that name until eighteen thirty nine. He just
knew he was trying to capture light and use it
to replicate the imagery of the world around him. He
did not seem to know that a lot of other
men had already been doing the same thing for quite
a while, with no real success. It makes sense that
(16:02):
after creating the Diorama, De gear would feel driven to
find a new level of realism to keep audiences buying tickets.
Part of his drive was probably the realization that Bhutan
wasn't really interested in staying with the diorama long term.
Degher knew the success of the business was totally up
to him. Additionally, the business had a lot of overhead.
(16:24):
Every time a new scene was staged had to be
created from scratch, and that was expensive. But if de
Geer didn't keep new images rotating in audiences would just
stop coming. He eventually sold off his interest in the
London location just to keep his finances afloat, and according
to friends and acquaintances, none of whom were allowed to
(16:46):
see what he was up to. He was completely obsessed
with his secret project. His beloved wife Louise brought him food,
but even she was not allowed into the lab. He sometimes,
again according to friends, went for two to three days
without leaving that lab, often for going sleep for unhealthy
long stretches as he worked. He had been familiar with
(17:08):
the camera obscura for a while For a refresher. This
is a dark chamber, either a room or a box
that has a tiny hole to allow light in through
that hole, an image of whatever is outside of the
chamber is projected onto the opposite wall inverted camera obscura,
which means dark chamber in Latin, is a concept that's
(17:29):
been around since antiquity, so this was not a new
technology when Degear was alive, but he thought that somehow
it could be used not just to project images, but
also to capture the light somehow. Because Degear didn't really
document what he was doing, but also he probably didn't
really know what he was doing to be able to
(17:51):
put it into words, we don't have a lot of
information about how this whole thing played out for him.
There were certainly experiments being done by other men using
chemistry to try to create images with light, including the
work of people like Jacques Charles, who figured out that
you could capture a person's silhouette on paper by treating
the paper with light sensitive chemicals and then projecting the
(18:12):
person's shadow onto it. But even Charles's images were temporary.
The entire paper would eventually darken because it had been treated.
The use of chemical processes was also probably pretty challenging
for Degear thanks to his inconsistent education in his early years.
He really just did not have a command of chemistry
(18:33):
to start from, but he did have access to optics
expertise and the associated equipment thanks to his friend Charles Chevalier.
The Chevalier family business was in producing various scientific equipment,
including lenses, so at least in that area, de Geer
had a very steady supply. It was through Chevalier that
(18:53):
de Geer made a crucial connection that would finally give
him a breakthrough. Nissfort Nips, his cousin, to Chevalier's shop
to purchase a camera obscurra. Nissi Fournipps had been working
on a process to create pictures using sunlight since the
eighteen teens. He had used a camera to create a
(19:14):
heliograph with bitumen on paper in eighteen twenty six, but
that had needed eight hours of exposure to work. Even
with that eight hours, it was kind of gauzy and
faded in appearance, so he was trying to improve on that.
When he asked about a new camera obscura, Charles Chevalier
(19:34):
got Nip's address, gave it to Louis de Gear, who
in turn reached out to Nips.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Via a letter.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Both of these men were a bit cautious. Initially, de
Gear did not want to risk any potential business interest
by giving away what he had been working on, and
Niepps was not entirely clear who Degear was or how
he had gotten his address, and this letter out of
the blue seemed kind of rude and suspicious to him.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
It was very forward.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
It would be like if a stranger called you, Tracy
and went like, hey, can I have your research log
ins at the following three places? Yeah, and you would
be like him, excuse considering my response when I get
unsolicited pr pitches to a personal email address that I've
never publicized, I totally get this reaction.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
So the reply that Niepp sent was brief and it
merely confirmed that, yes, he had been doing some experiments.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
Along the lines of what de Gear was asking about.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
It took Degher months to reply, but when he did,
he once again offended Niepps by asking for a sample
of his experiments. Nips knew that de Geer was the
man behind the popular diorama, so he started asking acquaintances
in Paris if they knew him. He found that Degere
had a reputation in the art world for his talent
and his work with light, but Niepps still only wrote
(20:53):
him a short reply without a sample. He said that
he thought they were on different paths. He's so polite
he wouldn't leave it unanswered, but he was kind of like, hey,
go with God, but uh, I'm doing something else, whether
out of genuine interest or just desperation. De Gear wrote
him once more, and this time he actually sent along
(21:15):
a sample of his own work, but he didn't know
that Nieps had also reached a sort of breaking point
where the family money was running out. He had spent
a lot on this effort, and he too was hitting
a dead end and not progressing any farther. He still
thought Degear might not be trustworthy, but he did reach
out with the suggestion that quote it should be of
(21:36):
mutual interest to reciprocate our efforts to attain the goal,
and he sent a sample which de Gear sent him
a pretty scathing critique of These two men finally had
a meeting in Paris in eighteen twenty seven. Understandably, they
remained pretty tentative with one another. Each was concerned that
he was lagging behind the other, but Niepp's described having
(21:59):
a pretty girl great time with the Gear, who had
given him a tour of the diorama. There was another
gap in their exchange due to the illness and death
of Niepp's brother, Claude, but eventually the two of them
were writing to one another with regularity. It was not
until autumn of eighteen twenty nine that the two officially
entered into a partnership, which had a ten year contract.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
So we're going to.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Talk about some of the details of Niepps's progress in
image capture. After we first pause and hear from the sponsors.
They keep stuff you missed in history class going in
his work, Niepps had coated a paper with silver chloride
(22:43):
to capture an image from his studio window of the
landscape outside.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
This is what he called heliography.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Eventually he made a more permanent image from that same window,
this time on a pewter plate. He wanted to make
a printable plate, and he had also managed to reproduce
an engraved portrait with his process and make two prints
from it. De Geer traveled to visit Nipp's and learned
about how he had progressed, and he took all of
the information he learned back to Paris so that he
(23:10):
could do more experiments. But then in eighteen thirty, everything
got complicated. The Diorama was in financial trouble, but Tom
finally left the business entirely, and the July Revolution, in
which Charles the tenth was deposed and King Louis Philippe
took on the Throat took the throne. That left France
in a tense time when letters that talked about something
(23:32):
like chemicals could easily be misconstrued as some kind of
revolutionary correspondence, so de Guer and Niepp stopped communicating. Things
were so financially tenuous that de Guer wrote to the
crown to ask for a promotion to officer in the
Legion of Honor. The thinking was that that would come
with a financial payment that would help to keep him
from his own financial ruin. But in the time that
(23:55):
he had free from working on the Diorama to try
to keep that going, Deguer learned Niepp's method of capturing images.
He wanted to see if he had any ideas for
how to move it forward. He and Yips were writing
to each other in codes so they could keep collaborating.
This was really a frantic time. De Gear declared bankruptcy
in March of eighteen thirty two, but he and Nips
(24:17):
kept working. Yeah. Eventually they came up with a list
where they gave chemical's number assignments and they each had it,
so they would just like use numbers in their letters,
which to me would look like a suspicious code that words.
So Nipps had used a bitumen coding that hardened when
exposed to light for some of his experiments, and de
(24:39):
Gear came up with a variation on that idea that
used distilled lavender oil to improve on the heliograph. That
lavender oil left a white residue in areas of the
image where light had hit it, and that created an
improved image than they had had before that the duo
called a faizototype. This was an improvement, but it wasn't
really a breakthrough, not at the level they needed, so
(25:01):
they kept working. I like to think that this smelled
really nice, I hope, so if nothing else, they could
say the studio smelled beautiful.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
So Degear shifted his work back to using silver salts
instead of a resin based image capture. There's an apocryphal
story about how he got to his next breakthrough. In it,
he had accidentally left a spoon on an iodized plate,
and then later realized that a perfect shadow of the
spoon had been created on the plate when the light
(25:32):
hit it. So he started to purposefully sensitize the silver
on the plates that they were using. He did this
with iodine fumes. The Gear is said to have shared
this story verbally throughout his life, but he never wrote
it down. We don't really know how accurate it is. Yeah,
there are some questions about how much that story may
have changed in the tellings. Initially, Degear's work with iodine
(25:55):
to sensitize plates did not really return results. But he
never got to share his frustration about this with Nips
because Nisifor died suddenly in July eighteen thirty three after
having a stroke, and this left de Gear without the
scientific expertise of his collaborator. But once again he was
tenacious and he kept at the work, and an accident
(26:17):
is again said to have given him the next advancement.
Degere is said to have placed one of his polished
silver coated plates into a cupboard after having exposed it
in a camera obscura. The cupboard was a light proof
chemical cupboard that was intended for storing exposed plates but
he noticed when he returned to the place roughly half
(26:38):
an hour later, the image that he had exposed in
the camera obscura had already developed. A thermometer had broken
in the cupboard, and Luis de Gher realized that mercury
vapor was speeding the development. Yeah, again, this is apocryphal,
so in some versions of it you'll see that he
left it overnight, frustrated that it had not initially developed. Regardless,
(27:00):
this was a huge step forward, but the process was
still not solid, and that is mostly because the images
themselves were not. Permanence of those images remained a problem.
Those plates would just keep developing over time and the
image would be lost, so they would just like keep
having more details until they just became a big blob. Eventually,
(27:23):
Degear figured that problem out as well. It was merely
a matter of stopping the developing process by removing the
excess silver iodide from the plate. Degear used a salt
solution of sodium thiosulfate to do this. So the system
for making what would be called a Dagera type was
one polish a silver coated copper plate, two sensitize the
(27:45):
plate with iodine fumes, and place it in a light
tight plate. Three, slide that plate into the camera obscura
and then slide the light type covering open. Four expose
that for some number of minutes, and that was variable
depending on the light and the camera obscura and the
concentration of the chemicals that were used. So this required
(28:06):
some experience and know how of the person who was
trying to make the image. Step five develop the image
in mercury vapor and step six stop the development process
with AsSalt based solution. The first public mention of Degear's
work actually appeared in eighteen thirty five, so several years before.
Like the big release about it, that wasn't an article
(28:29):
in the Journal des Artiste, that was about new shows
at the Diorama, It wasn't about image capture at all.
But at the end of the write up, which had
no attribution as to its author and has even made
some people question whether maybe Deguer wrote this himself, there
was the following paragraph quote he has discovered, we are
told the means of collecting on a plate prepared by him,
(28:52):
the image produced by a camera obscura in such a
way that a portrait, a landscape, or any view projected
on this plate by an ordinary camera obscura leaves its
impression in light and shade, and this presents the most
perfect of all drawings. A preparation applied to this image
preserves it for an indefinite time. Physical science has perhaps
(29:14):
never presented a wonder comparable to this one. This was
a considerable announcement, but nothing much seems to have been
said about it for the entire year. But then architect
Alphonse Eugene Hubert wrote a response that amounted to basically,
I seriously doubt it. He had been trying to capture
camera obscure images as well, but had not had any luck,
(29:38):
so to him, it seemed highly unlikely that de Geer,
who did not have a scientific background, could have managed it.
By eighteen thirty seven, de Geer had tested and replicated
his process enough times that it was set he could
always get consistent results. As with other aspects of his
work that we don't really know what that process of
(29:58):
testing and refinement was like. We have no idea, truly
no idea the manner in which he arrived at realizing
each step along the way was the correct one. We
do know his process was different from all of the
other photographic processes that were in development by other people
that were having problems. The Academy of Sciences heard a
(30:18):
presentation that laid out exactly how de Geer's process worked
on January seventh, eighteen thirty nine. That lecture was not
given by de Geer, but by Francois Arago. De Gear
couldn't do it. He had felt ill, or at least
he claimed he did. We don't know he at least
he said he felt ill. He may have had nerves,
(30:38):
and that is why an astronomer first explained photography at
the Academy of Sciences. But to Gear had decided to
name this process after himself, of course, and that was
something that really bothered Nissophornief's son Isidore, who felt that
his father should really be recognized. But to Gear really
thought that he had changed the approach so much from
(31:00):
the heliograph works that Niepps had done that the name
shift was warranted. An In a revised version of the
contract that he had originally agreed to you with Niepps,
Degear offered his former partner's family financial rights to half
of the money made from Deghera typing, and the promise
that Niepps's name would always be included in formal announcements.
(31:21):
Isadore Niepps signed this new deal. In terms of making
money from this work, Louis de Gher took an interesting approach.
He knew from his experience with the diorama that imitators
would pop up as soon as he filed for a patent,
and in France at the time, there was really not
much that could be done about it, so instead he
sold it to the French government, and in turn, the
(31:43):
French government released it free to the world as a
gift on August nineteenth, eighteen thirty nine. As part of
the sale to the government, de Geer had arranged for
annual payments to be made to both himself and Nieps's family.
Degere got six thousand francs a year and nips As
got four thousand. The gear did manage to patent his
(32:04):
process in England, Ireland and Scotland before the French government
released it, so he maintained his rights there and in
their colonies. Yeah, he did try for a while some
other business sort of plans to try and make money
off of this, but none of those were really working out,
which is why he sold it to the government. As
(32:24):
the Dagheera type took on a life of its own
and the field of photography continued to advance through other
inventors improving upon it, da Gear retired again.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
He was financially set.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
A fire destroyed a lot of his early work in
eighteen thirty nine, and he did not rebuild his burnt
studio after that. He did give some presentations and lessons
on occasion, but according to most people, he was actually
kind of shy, particularly about talking about his achievement, and
all he really wanted to do was go back to painting,
and he did a lot of that in his later years.
(32:56):
During the eighteen forties, he painted a number of huge
pieces churches in Paris. Louis de Guerret died of a
heart attack on July tenth, eighteen fifty one, at his
home in Brisumern, just outside of Paris. In the time
between the announcement of the da gettype and his death,
other innovators had come up with new ways to capture
imagery with light. That included William Henry Fox Talbot, who
(33:20):
patented a paper negative process, the Cali type in eighteen
forty one. The garrottype studios opened in Europe and the
United States, and two photography journals were launched in the US.
They were the Dagarian Art Journal and the Photographic Art Journal.
And then, immediately before his death, starting in May of
eighteen fifty one, a Dagherot type exhibition had been mounted
(33:42):
at the Great Exhibition of London.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Which is another thing that comes up a lot.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Also, Hey, surprise, this is the first of a sort
of two parter that we're doing on early photography. They
are stand the Loan episodes, but they're linked thematically, and
on an upcoming episode we are going to discuss one
of the people who took Degear's new technology kind of
ran with it.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Oh, Louis Decade.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
Betrayal Season 5
Saskia Inwood woke up one morning, knowing her life would never be the same. The night before, she learned the unimaginable – that the husband she knew in the light of day was a different person after dark. This season unpacks Saskia’s discovery of her husband’s secret life and her fight to bring him to justice. Along the way, we expose a crime that is just coming to light. This is also a story about the myth of the “perfect victim:” who gets believed, who gets doubted, and why. We follow Saskia as she works to reclaim her body, her voice, and her life. If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.