Indeed, In September of 1838, Daguerre, with his first fixed image, approached famous scientists around Paris to help him spark attention towards his invention. And so on August 19, 1839, his 81/2" x 61/2" image, the Boulevard du Temple, which he aptly called a Daguerreotype, was accepted by the Academy of Sciences and convinced the French Parlement to buy the rights of the process and to make it available internationally.

Daguerreotype was a process where the sensitive material comprised silver nitrate coated on a metal base, and a positive image was produced by a single camera exposure and developed in a vapor of mercury. Curiously enough, this process is at the same time a positive and negative in one image, and one has to look at it at an angle to view the image properly. Because this process required an exposure of 30 minutes with a camera obscura, elements which were in motion during the exposure could not be registered into the image. American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse was charmed by the exquisite minuteness of the delineation, but also said that "Objects moving are not impressed. The Boulevard, so constantly filled with a moving throng of pedestrians and carriages was perfectly solitary, except an individual who was having his boots brushed." Daguerreotype was in high demand until the invention of the Collodion in 1851.

Meanwhile, Henry Fox-Talbot in England, also in 1839, had discovered his Calotype , the first paper negative process in which a paper is first coated with a solution of silver iodide and potassium iodide, and a coat of silver nitrate shortly before exposure. After exposure in the camera lucida (an improved version of the camera obscura) for about 5 mintes, it is then developed in similar solution, and then fixed. In producing a positive print, Talbot rubbed his negative with wax for it to become entirely transparent before putting on a new paper with solution (in the darkroom) ready for contact-printing. While Daguerre’s invention was a ‘one-shot’ deal, Talbot’s Calotype was made up of a positive and negative components which made an image reproducible. Talbot, in 1844, published The Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with genuine photographs.

In July of 1827, however, a good 12-year era before the ‘invention’ of photography, a low-profile but wealthy Frenchman Joseph Neciphore Neipce had already produced and "fixed" an image using a simple asphalt-coated plate. His View from the Study Window at Maisun de Gras, a 6 ½" x 7 ¾" direct image and with left-to-right reversal, is in all probability, according to a Taschen publication, the first permanent image in the history of photography. He exposed the image for 8 hours, which is the reason why the shadows of the image are marked on the right and left sides of the structures.

Why was he not then proclaimed the inventor? Neipce, like most of us, hated paperworks. And also being a scion of a landed family, a mall governmental pension could not have encouraged him to divulge his discoveries to the Academy of Sciences of France.

So, again, who invented photography?"

Historians of photography have been very careful in naming names. Here they are:

• Neipce invented the first photograph.

• Daguerre invented the first photograph with a human being in it.

• Talbot invented the first photograph which comprised of a positive and negative components, very much like the traditional photographic process of today.

• And Sir John Herschel coined the words ‘positive,’ ‘negative,’ and ‘photography.’

So be them.