1826Reputable sourceWell documented
The First Photograph
On the timeline · around 1826 ·
What happened
The French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the world's first surviving photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras. Using a process he called heliography, he coated a pewter plate with light-sensitive bitumen and exposed it in a camera obscura for many hours, permanently fixing an image of the rooftops outside his window.
Why it matters
Niépce achieved what humans had dreamed of for centuries: capturing a real scene automatically, by light itself. His crude, faint image is the ancestor of every photograph ever taken.