Today, America turns 250 years old – which means the US predates the invention of photography by about 50 years. But while the camera didn’t exist to record the Founding Fathers, the oldest known surviving American photograph was taken only shortly after the invention of the daguerreotype in France.
Inventor Joseph Saxon was working at the US Mint in Philadelphia in the fall of 1839 when he experimented with a relatively new technology from Europe: he took a photo from a window, freezing the nearby Central High School in a small two-inch square. Exposing the photo took a full ten minutes.
