When Pictures Make History

Photography Is Invented
A French theatrical designer, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and a British inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, above, right, develop technology that freezes time in its flight, offering a new way to capture reality. Daguerre's daguerreotype (1839) and Talbot's invention of a method to capture light on paper (rather than metal) meant that we would no longer have to conjecture about the look of the past; if a camera was present, an event's visual contours could be locked in place forever.

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