Nicéphore Niépce

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

(French: [nisefɔʁ njɛps]; 7 March 1765 – 5
July 1833),[1] commonly known or referred
to simply as Nicéphore Niépce, was a
French inventor, usually credited as the
inventor of photography and a pioneer in
that field.[2] Niépce developed heliography,
a technique he used to create the world's
oldest surviving product of a photographic
process: a print made from a
photoengraved printing plate in 1825.[3] In
1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera
to produce the oldest surviving
photograph of a real-world scene. Among
Niépce's other inventions was the
Pyréolophore, the world's first internal
combustion engine, which he conceived,
created, and developed with his older
brother Claude Niépce.[4]
 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Niépce c. 1795

Born 7 March 1765

Chalon-sur-Saône,
Saône-et-Loire

Died 5 July 1833 (aged 68)

Saint-Loup-de-
Varennes, Saône-et-
Loire

Occupation Inventor
Known for Photography
Pyréolophore internal
combustion engine
Signature

Biography

Early life …
Niépce's birthplace at Chalon-sur-Saône, with a plaque
in his memory

Niépce was born in Chalon-sur-Saône,

Saône-et-Loire, where his father was a
wealthy lawyer. His older brother Claude
(1763–1828) was also his collaborator in
research and invention, but died half-mad
and destitute in England, having
squandered the family wealth in pursuit of
non-opportunities for the Pyréolophore.
Niépce also had a sister and a younger
brother, Bernard.[5][6][7][8]

Nicéphore was baptized Joseph but

adopted the name Nicéphore, in honour of
Saint Nicephorus the ninth-century
Patriarch of Constantinople, while studying
at the Oratorian college in Angers. At the
college he learned science and the
experimental method, rapidly achieving
success and graduating to work as a
professor of the college.
Military career …

Niépce served as a staff officer in the

French army under Napoleon, spending a
number of years in Italy and on the island
of Sardinia, but ill health forced him to
resign, whereupon he married Agnes
Romero and became the Administrator of
the district of Nice in post-revolutionary
France. In 1795, Niépce resigned as
administrator of Nice to pursue scientific
research with his brother Claude. One
source reports his resignation to have
been forced due to his
unpopularity.[5][6][7][8]

Scientific research …

In 1801 the brothers returned to the

family's estates in Chalon to continue their
scientific research, and where they were
united with their mother, their sister and
their younger brother Bernard. Here they
managed the family estate as
independently wealthy gentlemen-farmers,
raising beets and producing sugar.[5][6][7][8]
Claude Niépce …

In 1827 Niépce journeyed to England to

visit his seriously ill elder brother Claude
Niépce, who was now living in Kew, near
London. Claude had descended into
delirium and squandered much of the
family fortune chasing inappropriate
business opportunities for the
Pyréolophore.[5]

Death …

Nicéphore Niépce died of a stroke on 5

July 1833, financially ruined such that his
grave in the cemetery of Saint-Loup de
Varennes was financed by the
municipality. The cemetery is near the
family house where he had experimented
and had made the world's first
photographic image.[6]

Descendants …

His son Isidore (1805–68) formed a

partnership with Daguerre after his father's
death and was granted a government
pension in 1839 in return for disclosing the
technical details of Nicéphore's
heliogravure process.[5][6]

A cousin, Claude Félix Abel Niépce de

Saint-Victor (1805–1870), was a chemist
and was the first to use albumen in
photography. He also produced
photographic engravings on steel.[8] During
1857–1861, he discovered that uranium
salts emit a form of radiation that is
invisible to the human eye.[9]

Achievements

Photography …
One of the three earliest known photographic
artifacts, created by Nicéphore Niépce in 1825. It is an
ink-on-paper print, but the printing plate used to make
it was photographically created by Niépce's
heliography process. It reproduces a 17th-century
Flemish engraving.

Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or

1827), the earliest surviving photograph of a real-
world scene, made using a camera obscura.[10]
Original plate (left) & colorized reoriented
enhancement (right).

The date of Niépce's first photographic

experiments is uncertain. He was led to
them by his interest in the new art of
lithography,[11] for which he realized he
lacked the necessary skill and artistic
ability, and by his acquaintance with the
camera obscura, a drawing aid which was
popular among affluent dilettantes in the
late 18th and early 19th centuries. The
camera obscura's beautiful but fleeting
little "light paintings" inspired a number of
people, including Thomas Wedgwood and
Henry Fox Talbot, to seek some way of
capturing them more easily and effectively
than could be done by tracing over them
with a pencil.

Letters to his sister-in-law around 1816

indicate that Niépce had managed to
capture small camera images on paper
coated with silver chloride,[12] making him
apparently the first to have any success at
all in such an attempt, but the results were
negatives, dark where they should be light
and vice versa, and he could find no way to
stop them from darkening all over when
brought into the light for viewing.

Niépce turned his attention to other

substances that were affected by light,
eventually concentrating on Bitumen of
Judea, a naturally occurring asphalt that
had been used for various purposes since
ancient times. In Niépce's time, it was
used by artists as an acid-resistant
coating on copper plates for making
etchings. The artist scratched a drawing
through the coating, then bathed the plate
in acid to etch the exposed areas, then
removed the coating with a solvent and
used the plate to print ink copies of the
drawing onto paper. What interested
Niépce was the fact that the bitumen
coating became less soluble after it had
been left exposed to light.

Niépce dissolved bitumen in lavender oil, a

solvent often used in varnishes,[13] and
thinly coated it onto a lithographic stone or
a sheet of metal or glass. After the coating
had dried, a test subject, typically an
engraving printed on paper, was laid over
the surface in close contact and the two
were put out in direct sunlight. After
sufficient exposure, the solvent could be
used to rinse away only the unhardened
bitumen that had been shielded from light
by lines or dark areas in the test subject.
The parts of the surface thus laid bare
could then be etched with acid, or the
remaining bitumen could serve as the
water-repellent material in lithographic
printing.

Niépce called his process heliography,

which literally means "sun drawing".[14] In
1822, he used it to create what is believed
to have been the world's first permanent
photographic image,[15] a contact-exposed
copy of an engraving of Pope Pius VII, but
it was later destroyed when Niépce
attempted to make prints from it.[15] The
earliest surviving photographic artifacts by
Niépce, made in 1825,[3] are copies of a
17th-century engraving of a man with a
horse and of what may be an etching or
engraving of a woman with a spinning
wheel. They are simply sheets of plain
paper printed with ink in a printing press,
like ordinary etchings, engravings, or
lithographs, but the plates used to print
them were created photographically by
Niépce's process rather than by laborious
and inexact hand-engraving or drawing on
lithographic stones. They are, in essence,
the oldest photocopies. One example of
the print of the man with a horse and two
examples of the print of the woman with
the spinning wheel are known to have
survived. The former is in the collection of
the Bibliothèque nationale de France in
Paris and the latter two are in a private
collection in the United States.
Niépce's correspondence with his brother
Claude has preserved the fact that his first
real success in using bitumen to create a
permanent photograph of the image in a
camera obscura came in 1824. That
photograph, made on the surface of a
lithographic stone, was later effaced. In
1826 or 1827 he again photographed the
same scene, the view from a window in his
house, on a sheet of bitumen-coated
pewter. The result has survived and is now
the oldest known camera photograph still
in existence. The historic image had
seemingly been lost early in the 20th
century, but photography historian Helmut
Gernsheim succeeded in tracking it down
in 1952. The exposure time required to
make it is usually said to have been eight
or nine hours, but that is a mid-20th
century assumption based largely on the
fact that the sun lights the buildings on
opposite sides, as if from an arc across
the sky, indicating an essentially day-long
exposure. A later researcher who used
Niépce's notes and historically correct
materials to recreate his processes found
that in fact several days of exposure in the
camera were needed to adequately
capture such an image on a bitumen-
coated plate.[16]

In 1829,[17] Niépce entered into a

partnership with Louis Daguerre, who was
also seeking a means of creating
permanent photographic images with a
camera. Together, they developed the
physautotype, an improved process that
used lavender oil distillate as the
photosensitive substance. The partnership
lasted until Niépce's death in 1833, after
which Daguerre continued to experiment,
eventually working out a process that only
superficially resembled Niépce's.[18] He
named it the "daguerréotype", after
himself. In 1839 he managed to get the
government of France to purchase his
invention on behalf of the people of
France. The French government agreed to
award Daguerre a yearly stipend of 6,000
francs for the rest of his life, and to give
the estate of Niépce 4,000 francs yearly.
This arrangement rankled Niépce's son,
who claimed Daguerre was reaping all the
benefits of his father's work. In some
ways, he was right—for many years,
Niépce received little credit for his
contribution. Later historians have
reclaimed Niépce from relative obscurity,
and it is now generally recognized that his
"heliography" was the first successful
example of what we now call
"photography":[13] the creation of a
reasonably light-fast and permanent
image by the action of light on a light-
sensitive surface and subsequent
processing.

Although initially ignored amid the

excitement caused by the introduction of
the daguerreotype, and far too insensitive
to be practical for making photographs
with a camera, the utility of Niépce's
original process for its primary purpose
was eventually realized. From the 1850s
until well into the 20th century, a thin
coating of bitumen was widely used as a
slow but very effective and economical
photoresist for making printing plates.

Pyréolophore …
Draisienne built by Niépce, 1818 – Musée Nicéphore
Niépce

The Pyréolophore, probably the world's

first internal combustion engine that was
actually built, was invented and patented
by the Niépce brothers in 1807. This
engine ran on controlled dust explosions
of lycopodium powder and was installed
on a boat that ran on the river Saône. Ten
years later, the brothers were the first in
the world to make an engine work with a
fuel injection system.[19]

Marly machine …

In 1807 the imperial government opened a

competition for a hydraulic machine to
replace the original Marly machine
(located in Marly-le-Roi) that delivered
water to the Palace of Versailles from the
Seine river. The machine was built in
Bougival in 1684, from where it pumped
water a distance of one kilometer and
raised it 150 meters. The Niépce brothers
conceived a new hydrostatic principle for
the machine and improved it once more in
1809. The machine had undergone
changes in many of its parts, including
more precise pistons, creating far less
resistance. They tested it many times, and
the result was that with a stream drop of
4 feet 4 inches, it lifted water 11 feet. But
in December 1809 they got a message
that they had waited too long and the
Emperor had taken on himself the decision
to ask the engineer Périer (1742–1818) to
build a steam engine to operate the pumps
at Marly.[20]
Vélocipède …

In 1818 Niépce became interested in the

ancestor of the bicycle, a Laufmaschine
invented by Karl von Drais in 1817. He built
himself a model and called it the
vélocipède (fast foot) and caused quite a
sensation on the local country roads.
Niépce improved his machine with an
adjustable saddle and it is now exhibited
at the Niépce Museum. In a letter to his
brother Nicéphore contemplated
motorizing his machine.[21]
Nicéphore Niépce

Legacy and commemoration

The lunar crater Niépce is named after
him.

As of 2008 Niépce's photograph View from

the Window at Le Gras is on display in the
Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
The image was rediscovered in 1952 by
historians Alison and Helmut
Gernsheim.[22]

The Niépce Prize has been awarded

annually since 1955 to a professional
photographer who has lived and worked in
France for over 3 years. It was introduced
in honour of Niépce by Albert Plécy of the
l'Association Gens d'Images.

See also
Timeline of photography technology
 Timeline of transportation technology
History of the internal combustion
engine
François Isaac de Rivaz
Janine Niépce, photographer
List of works by Eugène Guillaume

References
1. Nicéphore Niépce at the
Encyclopædia Britannica
2. Baatz, Willfried (1997). Photography:
An Illustrated Historical Overview .
 New York: Barron's. p. 16 . ISBN 0-
7641-0243-5.
3. "World's oldest photo sold to library" .
BBC News. 21 March 2002. Retrieved
17 November 2011. "The image of an
engraving depicting a man leading a
horse was made in 1825 by Nicéphore
Niépce, who invented a technique
known as heliogravure."
4. "Nicéphore Niépce House Museum" .
Nicéphore Niépce House Museum.
5. "History of Art: History of
Photography" .
 . "Le Pyréolophore de Nicéphore" .
Ferragus. Archived from the original
on 2019-07-20. Retrieved 2010-08-17.
7. "Research Joseph Nicéphore Niépce –
Science and Its Times" .
BookRags.com.
. "Joseph Nicéphore Niépce" .
Answers.com. Archived from the
original on 24 November 2011.
9. In 1861, Niépce de Saint-Victor
concluded that uranium salts emitted
an invisible radiation that caused
photographic plates to fog. From
pages 34–35 of: Niépce de Saint-
Victor (1861) "Cinquième mémoire sur
une nouvelle action de la lumière"
(Fifth memoir on a new action of light),
Comptes rendus ... , vol. 53, pages 33–
35.
"... cette activité persistante ... ne peut
mème pas être de la
phosphorescence, car elle ne durerait
pas si longtemps, d'après les
expériences de M. Edmond Becquerel;
il est donc plus probable que c'est un
rayonnement invisible à nos yeux,
comme le croit M. Léon Foucault, ...."
"... this persistent activity ... cannot be
 due to phosphorescence, for it
[phosphorescence] would not last so
long, according to the experiments of
Mr. Edmond Becquerel; it is thus more
likely that it is a radiation that is
invisible to our eyes, as Mr. Léon
Foucault believes, ...."
10. Camera, A History of Photography
from Daguerreotype to Digital, 2009,
pgs. 2, 3, George Eastman House,
Rochester, NY, Sterling Signature, an
Imprint of Sterling Publish, Todd
Gustavson et. al., (Curator of
 Technology, George Eastman House),
ISBN 978-1-4549-0002-3
11. "Around the World in 1896 : A Brief
History of Photography ." The Library
of Congress. 2002. 18 September
2008.
12. Stokstad, Marilyn; David Cateforis;
Stephen Addiss (2005). Art History
(Second ed.). Upper Saddle River, New
Jersey: Pearson Education. p. 964.
ISBN 0-13-145527-3.
13. Gorman, Jessica (2007). "Photography
at a Crossroads". Science News. 162
 (21): 331–333. doi:10.2307/4013861 .
JSTOR 4013861 .
14. Baatz, Willfried (1997). Photography:
An Illustrated Historical Overview .
New York: Barron's. p. 16 . ISBN 0-
7641-0243-5.
15. "The First Photograph — Heliography" .
Archived from the original on 6
October 2009. Retrieved 29 September
2009. "from Helmut Gernsheim's
article, "The 150th Anniversary of
Photography," in History of
Photography, Vol. I, No. 1, January
1977: ... In 1822, Niépce coated a
 glass plate ... The sunlight passing
through ... This first permanent
example ... was destroyed ... some
years later."
1 . Niépce House Museum: Invention of
Photography, Part 3 Archived 2014-
03-16 at the Wayback Machine.
Retrieved 25 May 2013.
17. "Joseph Nicéphore Niépce" . Microsoft
Encarta Online Encyclopedia. 2008.
Archived from the original on 27 June
2008. Retrieved 27 June 2008.
1 . Crawford, William (1979). The Keepers
of Light. New York: Morgan & Morgan.
 pp. 23–27. ISBN 0-87100-158-6.
19. "The Pyreolophore" .
20. "Other Inventions: the Marly Machine" .
Archived from the original on 2012-
08-04. Retrieved 2009-07-03.
21. "Other Inventions: the Velocipede" .
Archived from the original on 2012-
08-04. Retrieved 2009-07-03.
22. Gernsheim, Helmet; Gernsheim, Alison
(September 1952). "Rediscovery of the
World's First Photograph" (PDF).
Image, Journal of Photography of
George Eastman House. Rochester,
 NY: International Museum of
Photography at George Eastman
House Inc. 1 (6): 1–2. Archived from
the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016.
Retrieved 24 June 2014.

Sources
Marignier, J. L., Niépce: l'invention de la
photographie (1999)
Bajac, Q., The Invention of Photography,
trans. R. Taylor (2002)

External links
Wikimedia Commons has media
related to Nicéphore Niépce.

Website about Niépce (in French)

Website about Niépce
University of Texas exhibition site on
"The First Photograph"
The history men: Helmut Gernsheim and
Nicéphore Niépce on Photo Histories
Documentary video on restoration of
Nicephore Niepce's home on YouTube
Home page of the 'Niépce prize' at the
association Gens d'Images
Retrieved from
"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Nicéphore_Niépce&oldid=965312391"

Last edited 20 days ago by Joel B. Lewis

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