When did we invent photography?
History of photography
The history of photography began in remote antiquity with the discovery of two critical principles; camera obscura image projection and the observation that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. Apart from a possibly photographic but unrecognised process used on the Turin Shroud there are no artefacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century. Around 1717 Johann Heinrich Schulze captured cut-out letters on a bottle of a light-sensitive slurry, but he apparently never thought of making the results durable. Around 1800 Thomas Wedgwood made the first reliably documented, although unsuccessful attempt at capturing camera images in permanent form. His experiments did produce detailed photograms, but Wedgwood and his associate Humphry Davy found no way to fix these images.
History of photography
French balloonist/professor/inventor Jacques Charles is believed to have captured fleeting negative photograms of silhouettes on light sensitive paper at the start of the 19th century, prior to Wedgwood. Charles died in 1823 without documenting the process, but purportedly demonstrated it in his lectures at the Louvre. It was not publicized until François Arago mentioned it at his introduction of the details of the Daguerreotype to the world in 1839. He later wrote that the first idea of fixing the images of the camera obscura or the solar microscope with chemical substances belonged to Charles. Later historians probably only built on Arago's information and much later the unsupported year 1780 was attached to it.[19] Since Arago indicated the first years of the 19th century and a date prior to Wedgwood's process published in 1802, this would mean that Charles' demonstrations took place in 1800 or 1801 - assuming Arago was this accurate almost 40 years later.