What is depicted in the oldest photograph in the world

Today it is impossible to imagine the world without photographs. People take selfies, try to capture important moments of life, even read articles on the Internet more often if they have pictures. Do not worry, this post also did not do without illustrations. Yes, what! Introducing the world's first photograph taken in 1826 - 191 years ago!

And from our window ...

In 1826, an inventor named Joseph Nisefort Niepce took a photograph that shows a view from the window of Niepce's workshop at Le Gras estate in Saint-Lou-de-Varenne, France. It is called "View from the window at Le Gras" and is the first photograph in the world. There is little to see on it, but then it was a real revolutionary breakthrough.

Of course, the process of photographing itself was very different from how it is happening now. Already familiar with the experiments, when the tin plates retained the outlines of the objects that were placed on them, Nieps decided to capture something more distant. To do this, he covered the tin alloy plate with "Syrian asphalt" mixed with water - a special bitumen known since the time of the ancient Egyptians. Then he put the tile in the pinhole camera and directed it out the window.

On the picture: The cliche obtained by Nieps in 1826 in the obscura chamber

The inventor left the camera like this for a long period, possibly up to two days. During this time, the areas of bitumen that received more sunlight hardened compared to areas that were facing the building or the dark part of the horizon. Nieps then washed off the soft parts of the plate to create a barely visible picture. She is now at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

Next is the daguerreotype

Although heliography (as Nieps himself called his technique) produced the oldest known photograph in the world, image quality was poor and it took a long time for truly distinguishable photographs to begin to be obtained. Only when Niepps teamed up with another inventor, Louis Daguerre, was the daguerreotype invented - a photograph that had higher image quality and did not take so much time.

In the photo: Helio-engraving "View from the window at Le Gras", printed from a lithographic cliche

Nieps died in 1833 before the technique was fully developed, but Daguerre, with the help of Nieps’s son, Isidore, eventually discovered that a silver plate exposed to mercury vapor could produce a photograph in a few minutes with higher quality.

By 1838, Daguerre photographed objects and buildings, and in 1839, the French government awarded Daguerre and Isidore Niepce lifelong pensions. The use of daguerreotypes, as these photos were called, quickly spread throughout the world, encouraging other inventors to find new and better ways to photograph, and eventually come up with ways to create moving images.