Today's Broadcast

Topic: Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre

Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre was born on this date in 1789. Students of 19th century popular entertainment know Daguerre for creating the diorama, a theatrical experience in which the audience viewed a series of layered, painted linen panels of a landscape. Through careful direction and manipulation of the light source, that lifelike landscape would appear to change. Audiences in Paris oohed and ahhed, and the inventor of the diorama, Monsieur Daguerre, was inspired to continue his work with light.

Those efforts led, of course, to the daguerreotype. But Daguerre did not work alone. He collaborated with Joseph Nicephore Niepce, who had already been credited with creating the heliograph, the world's first permanent photograph. The heliograph was made by producing a photoengraving on a metal plate that had been coated with an asphalt preparation. The word heliograph was coined by pairing helio (meaning "sun") with graph meaning "writing" or "representation."

 Daguerreotype, a photograph produced on a silver or silver-covered copper plate, was coined by pairing the old and now-obsolete sense of type that means "image"; "figurative representation" with Daguerre, the surviving member of the partnership; Niepce had died a few years into their collaboration.

Both daguerreotype and photograph (photo- means "light") first appeared in print in 1839; the older heliograph quickly faded into obscurity, but was revived decades later to name an apparatus for telegraphing that relied on the sun's rays flashed from a mirror.