Louis Daguerre

Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation

by Steven Johnson  · 5 Oct 2010  · 298pp  · 81,200 words

virtues of penicillin when the mold accidentally infiltrated a culture of Staphylococcus he had left by an open window in his lab. In the 1830s, Louis Daguerre spent years trying to coax images out of iodized silver plates. One night, after another futile attempt, he stored the plates in a cabinet packed

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that used electric signals to shift an electromagnet in a patterned print across paper, known as Morse code. PHOTOGRAPHY (1839) Most historians credit French chemist Louis Daguerre with developing the first practical photographic process, which involved fixing images on copper places covered in a chemical substance by exposing them to light. Daguerre

Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs

by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu  · 23 Jan 2024  · 305pp  · 101,093 words

in human understanding and capacity, is it even right to attribute its ownership to a single person? France was confronted with those two questions when Louis Daguerre, drawing on a long line of earlier experimenters and especially the work of his former partner, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, sought a patent for a device

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discovery the moment it was made, and is proud to be able to make a gift of it to the whole world.125 Parliament awarded Louis Daguerre a civil list pension instead. It was a better deal than the one David Brewster got. Similarly, in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

by Neil Postman and Jeff Riggenbach Ph.  · 1 Apr 2013  · 204pp  · 61,491 words

its assault; would, at least, have held its ground. As it happened, at almost exactly the same time Morse was reconceiving the meaning of information, Louis Daguerre was reconceiving the meaning of nature; one might even say, of reality itself. As Daguerre remarked in 1838 in a notice designed to attract investors

Big Bang

by Simon Singh  · 1 Jan 2004  · 492pp  · 149,259 words

. Also, the observation could only be recorded in words or a sketch, neither of which could be relied upon for perfect accuracy. Then, in 1839, Louis Daguerre released details of the daguerreotype, a process for chemically imprinting an image on a metal plate. Suddenly, daguerreomania swept the world, with people queuing up

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Robert J. Gordon  · 12 Jan 2016  · 1,104pp  · 302,176 words

AD 1000. Until the 1820s, however, there was no way to preserve the images that emerged from the pinhole. The daguerreotype, invented in 1839 by Louis Daguerre, was the first process that allowed a permanent image to be created, and soon afterward, in 1841, the Englishman Henry Fox Talbot developed a method

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity

by Lawrence Lessig  · 15 Nov 2004  · 297pp  · 103,910 words

upon; unfree, or permission, cultures leave much less. Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so. Chapter 2 "Mere Copyists" In 1839, Louis Daguerre invented the first practical technology for producing what we would call "photographs." Appropriately enough, they were called "daguerreotypes." The process was complicated and expensive, and

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick  · 1 Mar 2011  · 855pp  · 178,507 words

capable, in theory, of being recovered—given enough computing power. This was overoptimistic. Still, the same year Babbage published his essay, the artist and chemist Louis Daguerre in Paris perfected his means of capturing visual images on silver-coated plates. His English competitor, William Fox Talbot, called this “the art of photogenic

What Technology Wants

by Kevin Kelly  · 14 Jul 2010  · 476pp  · 132,042 words

geniuses discovered (or invented) decimal fractions. The electric telegraph was reinvented by Joseph Henry, Samuel Morse, William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone, and Karl Steinheil. The Frenchman Louis Daguerre is famous for inventing photography, but three others (Nicephore Niepce, Hercules Florence, and William Henry Fox Talbot) also independently came upon the same process. The

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron

by Lisa Gitelman  · 25 Jan 2013

of the nineteenth century, and it is perhaps simplest to describe it contextually with reference to the development of photography during those same years. When Louis Daguerre, Henry Fox Talbot, and others developed and then popularized the first photographic processes, observers were struck by the apparent displacement of human agency in the

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet

by David Kahn  · 1 Feb 1963  · 1,799pp  · 532,462 words

available since at least the time of Anton van Leeuwenhoek, there was for a long time no way of recording the distorted image. And when Louis Daguerre devised such a method, it soon became clear that no amount of viewing an out-of-focus photograph through correcting lenses would reproduce the original

Europe: A History

by Norman Davies  · 1 Jan 1996

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans  · 31 Aug 2016  · 976pp  · 329,519 words

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

by Charles Petzold  · 28 Sep 1999  · 566pp  · 122,184 words

Sex Power Money

by Sara Pascoe  · 26 Aug 2019  · 287pp  · 92,194 words

Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex

by Rachel Feltman  · 14 May 2022  · 306pp  · 88,545 words

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka  · 15 Jan 2024  · 321pp  · 105,480 words