In 1826 a Frenchman named Joseph Nicephore Niepce succceeded in obtaining the first permanent image of the view from the window of his house in the city of Chalon after an expousure time lasting several hours. Following Niepce´s death in 1833, his young partner Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre carried on his research, and his discovery of photography, called the Daguerreotype, was proclaimed to the world by the French Academy of Sciences in 1839.
(Preface)