“View from the Window at Le Gras” is a mesmerizing photo. It is as far back in time as you can see with your own eyes. It was taken sometime around the day John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died (July 4, 1826), and yet it doesn’t take so much imagination to feel the breeze and smell the air at Le Gras, does it? A picture is worth much more than a thousand words.
If you ever think you’re too old to innovate, or that maybe your best creative days are behind you, think again. Nicéphore Niépce was 61 years old when he finally succeeded in a quest he’d been on for at least ten years.
Countless people, to be sure, had seen an image of the world projected onto a surface through a pinhole or a lens:
But Niépce did what no one else had done before: He captured the image and made it permanent.
A memorial at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France commemorates this feat. It was dedicated on July 5, 1933, the 100th anniversary of the death of Niépce, who is nothing short of a French national treasure.
It’s most likely that “View from the Window at Le Gras” was taken in 1826, because we know that Niépce had just purchased pewter plates and camera materials that year. There is no older photograph known to exist.
Why did he use a pewter plate? He knew you could etch pewter with acid, as people still do today:
The acid eats into the metal, of course. But you can protect the pewter at the places you don’t want any etching. Normally that’s done by drawing or printing right on the metal with ink, because acid won’t penetrate many types of ink. It even works with a Sharpie!
One of the inks used for etching in Niépce’s time was asphalt, because it was thick and opaque. Asphalt had been around in the art world for a long time, as we see from sculptures like this one dating to the 2nd millennium BCE from the Persian city of Susa:
Niépce was a very observant guy, and he’d noticed that certain types of asphalt changed their properties if they sat out in sunlight for a while. You can dilute asphalt in petroleum or lavender oil as needed, but the longer the asphalt sits out in the sun, the harder it becomes to dissolve. This seems like a great property for pavement, but not really for ink!
A few things came together for Niépce in 1822. He figured that If he exposed asphalt to sunlight in a pattern for a long enough time, then the exposed parts would become hard to dissolve, yet the unexposed parts could still be whisked away with solvent. So he spread some asphalt solution onto a metal plate, let the solvent evaporate to leave a thin asphalt film, and used a print made from an engraving as a mask. He left that out in the sun for awhile:
Now he had the engraving pattern stuck to the plate as tar. He could then etch the plate, with tar protecting what would become the raised pattern, and make lots of prints from it. This wasn’t quite the first photograph, but it was the first photocopy!
But how to apply this to projected images of the world? Those are a lot dimmer than direct sunlight.
It was well-known that silver salts are quite sensitive to light, and a few people had indeed made fleeting images with them, including Niépce himself in 1816. The problem was, when you exposed those images to light to view them, the whole film would turn black and your image would disappear. Louis Daguerre would fix that, but not until 1839.
So Niépce kept experimenting with different types of asphalt until he came upon bitumen of Judea. A couple of pithy quotes on this material:
“ . . . of this kind is the lake which the Hebrews call the Dead Sea, and which is quite full of bituminous fluids”
— Agricola (1556), De Re Metallica
“The asphaltum, which is here collected, differs from that of the mines of Hasb’eia, as being more porous, and as having been apparently in a fluid state . . . ”
— Seetzen (1812), A Brief Account of the Countries adjoining the Lake of Tiberias, the Jordan, and the Dead Sea
This stuff was as light-sensitive as he could find, so one sunny summer day in 1826, he gave it a shot. He made a little box camera, set the asphalt-coated pewter plate inside it, aimed it out his window, and exposed it for a very long time. Some say it was 8 hours, others say a few days. Then he rinsed away the unexposed asphalt with solvent, and the hardened asphalt was left stuck to the plate. The result was this:
Niépce could have etched this plate to make prints out of it, but luckily he decided not to. If I were him, I wouldn’t have messed with it, either.
It’s the first photograph ever taken!
This plate is on display at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It had been lost for years, but after a long search, historian Helmut Gernsheim recovered it. It was found in a trunk in 1952, and even then its significance wasn’t clear. H. Baden Pritchard, editor of the Photographic News, had purchased the pewter plate in 1884, but died shortly after. His widow had allowed it to be exhibited in 1885 and 1898, but its whereabouts became uncertain after that, to her great dismay. Was it stolen? Misplaced? But, as Gernsheim writes...
[O]ne day my wife came running to me in great excitement, holding a piece of paper in the air, like Chamberlain in 1938, and shouted in triumph: ' "The Niepce photographs have been found," writes Mrs Pritchard'. Dumbfounded I read that her husband had died some months before. Going through his estate, a big trunk that had been in a London depository since 1917 had to be opened. Among old clothes, books and other family relics belonging to his mother (who had died in 1917) Mrs Pritchard had found the Niepce items I had been searching for. She regretted to have to tell me that the picture had completely faded. There was nothing to be seen.
Impatient to see the treasure trove for myself, for I knew that a bitumen picture could not fade, I telephoned to enquire when I could come. A lady companion answered that Mrs Pritchard was in bed with a cold, but would write to me as soon as she was well again. A month passed. At last came the day which I shall never forget: 14th February 1952.
[...C]offee was served in the sitting room and the great moment could not be far off, when Sherlock Holmes II would at last be allowed to inspect the treasure he had been trailing for six years. Reading my thoughts Mrs Pritchard got up, handed me a handsome mirror in a broad gold frame and said 'That's it. You will be disappointed, but I had warned you that there was nothing left of a picture'.
I was startled. I had not expected a looking glass, nor an Empire frame in which the pewter plate lay like a painting. I went to the window, held the plate at an angle to the light, as one does with daguerreotypes. No image was to be seen. Then I increased the angle — and suddenly the entire courtyard scene unfolded itself in front of my eyes. The ladies were speechless. Was I practising black magic on them? Then I turned the picture and read Francis Bauer's French and English inscription: 'Monsieur Niepce's first successful experiment of fixing permanently the image from Nature', and the date below, 1827. Only a historian can understand my feeling at that moment. I had reached the goal of my research and held the foundation stone of photography in my hand. I felt myself in communication with Niepce. 'Your nightmare existence in a trunk is over,' I thought. 'Potonniee was right. At long last you will be recognized as the inventor of photography. This picture will prove it to all the world.'
The 1827 date was affixed later by others, and Gernsheim makes a good case for 1826 being the actual date that the photograph was taken.
The view from the window at Le Gras is different today, but it’s been reconstructed by computer from old blueprints so we can get an idea of what the real scene looked like. When I first saw the photo, I couldn’t figure out why the big triangle was there. Was it made by shadows across the yard? No, that triangle turns out to be the slanted roof of the chicken coop:
It’s true that Louis Daguerre would go on to correct the fleeting nature of images made with silver salts by stopping the light reaction with thiosulfate, and that this resembles much more closely what we think of as film photography today.
But if you think that means Niépce’s invention was a dead end, boy, do you have another thing coming. The basic principle that Niépce used to make the first photograph is now found in technology from solar panels to polymer science to tissue engineering.
What had happened to Niépce’s asphalt in sunlight was crosslinking. Asphalt is made up of a zillion different compounds, but they’re all basically chains of carbon arranged in lots of ways, some of which are vulnerable to radiation that has higher energy, like the UV part of sunlight. UV can cause free radicals, or unpaired electrons, to form. If two of these unpaired electrons find each other, they will react immediately to form a new bond. Here’s an example of that sort of thing:
You can see that this simple reaction just doubled the size of your molecule. A few rounds of this, and your chains are now more like a giant network, and you aren’t going to dissolve that in anything.
Niépce aimed light by using a print or a projected image, but we’ve come a long way since then! Let me zip over just 3 examples of how this technology is used today:
Structural color in a polymer
From a June 20 article in the journal Science, check this out: You can turn a transparent polymer any color you want without using pigment, like a butterfly wing, if you crosslink it with light, as Niépce did with asphalt. This figure is so nicely annotated I don’t even have to explain it:
Using different chain lengths of polymer and different wavelengths of light, you get different colors!
Bone tissue engineering
Bone tissue likes to grow in cylindrical structures called osteons.
It’s hard to grow these to replace damaged bone, because the cells in the osteon take their growth cues from their geometrical arrangement. It’s tough to simulate that unless you can get the cells to arrange themselves in that shape. In a manuscript accepted June 8 by the journal Biomaterials, we see Niépce’s method used to fabricate little concentric circles in a silicon wafer. The silicon was painted with a crosslinkable material, then it was exposed to a laser projected in little concentric circles. The unexposed material was whisked away with solvent, just like Niépce had done. Then the silicon plate was etched and used to cast plastic plates to grow cells on. It worked:
Solar cells, LEDs, and sensors
Nanocrystals are a nice way to place solid materials like semiconductors and magnets onto surfaces. You can dissolve them in a solvent and apply a layer of them where you need it. But a clever trick discovered in 2017 (Science again) uses nanocrystals engineered with chemical properties that make them insoluble when exposed to light, because they crosslink. This is a lot like bitumen of Judea, except the nanocrystals aren’t used as a mask for etching; instead they become the structure itself, so you don’t have to etch anything or bother with any other solvents:
You can even do this in successive layers to form 3-D structures. Very, very useful for new microelectronic devices!
As if photocopying, photolithography, and photography weren’t enough, Nicéphore Niépce and his brother Claude, back in 1807, were the first people to power a boat with an internal combustion engine, one which used powdered moss (!) or coal dust as the fuel. That’s a subject for another day, though...
Most people don’t know all this about Niépce, but he’s thought of well enough to have had a crater named after him on the Moon. (You didn’t think you were getting out of one of my diaries without some mention of astronomy, did you?)
So Niépce took a simple photograph of his yard, but that discovery is still with us in so many ways, right up to this very day in cutting-edge research. Not too bad for a man from the little village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, current population 1,184.
In this village, Nicéphore Niépce invented photography in 1822.