Louis Daguerre - Competition With Talbot

Competition With Talbot

Unbeknownst to either inventor, Daguerre's developmental work in the mid-1830s coincided with photographic experiments being conducted by Henry Fox Talbot in England. Talbot had succeeded in producing a "sensitive paper" impregnated with silver chloride and capturing small camera images on it in the summer of 1835. At least one of those images still survives. Talbot was unaware that Daguerre's late partner Niépce had obtained similar small camera images on silver-chloride-coated paper nearly twenty years earlier. Niépce could find no way to keep them from darkening all over when exposed to light for viewing and had therefore turned away from silver salts to experiment with other substances such as bitumen. Talbot, a gifted amateur chemist, was able to chemically stabilize his images sufficiently to withstand subsequent inspection in daylight with only a very limited degree of discoloration.

When the first reports of the French Academy of Sciences announcement of Daguerre's invention reached Talbot, with no details about the exact nature of the images or the process itself, he assumed that methods similar to his own must have been used and promptly wrote an open letter to the Academy claiming priority of invention. Although it soon became apparent that Daguerre's process was very unlike his own, Talbot had been stimulated to resume his long-discontinued photographic experiments, which eventually resulted in the calotype process, introduced in 1841. Like a sensitized Daguerreotype plate, but unlike Talbot's earlier "sensitive paper", better known as "salted paper", the calotype paper had to be exposed in the camera only long enough to produce a very faint or completely invisible image which was then chemically developed to full visibility. The negative image that resulted was made insensitive to light by treatment with "hypo", dried, then used to make one or more positive prints on salted paper by contact printing in sunlight.

Daguerre's agent in England applied for a British patent just days before France declared the invention "free to the world". Great Britain was thereby uniquely denied France's free gift and became the only country where the payment of license fees was required. This had the effect of inhibiting the spread of the process there, to the eventual advantage of competing processes which were subsequently introduced. Antoine Claudet was one of the few people legally licensed to make Daguerreotypes in Britain. Daguerre's pension was relatively modest—barely enough to support a middle-class existence—and apparently this British "irregularity" was allowed to pass without adverse consequences or much comment outside of the UK.

By contrast, resentment and negative comments certainly resulted when the independently wealthy Talbot, who had spent a considerable amount of money in developing his calotype process (about £5,000, equivalent to £378,000 as of 2012), did not make a similar general gift of it to mankind, or at least to his own countrymen, but opted to emulate Daguerre's UK policy and require the purchase of licenses for its use. This inhibited the widespread adoption of the calotype process as an alternative to the Daguerreotype in the UK. Eventually, Talbot relented and required licenses only from professional photographers using the process for portraiture. Talbot also gained a reputation for litigiousness, suing several subsequent inventors whose processes he believed to infringe the broad claims made in some of his own British patents.