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.
Saxon, however, didn’t take the daguerreotype with a traditional camera. He exposed the daguerreotype, which is a copper plate coated with silver, inside a cigar box with a crude lens attached.
The first daguerreotype had been taken by Louis Daguerre only months earlier, in August 1839, using a camera obscura, a light-tight box.
Saxon's image is believed to be the oldest surviving American photograph, taken just a few months after the daguerreotype was introduced to the public by Louis Daguerre in 1839.
(Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is often credited with taking the first permanent photograph in 1826, but the daguerreotype made photographs more widely available.)
Today, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania owns the daguerreotype – but it doesn’t spend much time on display. If daguerreotypes are exposed to too much light, they fade to a mirror-like finish.
Shortly after Saxon took the cigar box daguerreotype, in October or November of that same year, Robert Cornelius took what’s widely believed to be the first American portrait (and the first self-portrait).
Cornelius took the photo of himself with a box and an opera lens, taking the photo outside because daguerreotypes required a several-minute exposure time.
While Cornelius proved the technology could capture a person’s likeness – if willing to hold still long enough – the first known photograph of a sitting American president wouldn’t arrive until a few years later, when John Quincy Adams was photographed in 1843.
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