Louis Daguerre 224th birthday honoured by Google doodle
French artist-physicist-inventor Louis Daguerre, widely credited for successfully capturing permanent photographs on a commercial scale lines a long list of inventors, artists, scientists that Google honours by showcasing their doodles on their search engine page.
Born November 18, 1787 Louis Daguerre (complete name Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre) partnered with contemporary and French printer Joseph Nicephore Niepce -- the actual inventor of a permamnent photograph, also called a heliograph -- in 1825 to help catalyse a process that speeded up creation of dioramas -- a picture viewing device.
While Niepce is credited with successfully inventing the first permanent photograph, Louis Daguerre made the entire process commercially viable.
Daguerre's efforts, in a way, is the harbinger of the age of digital photography and its explosion that we are witnessing today in the 21st century.
Louis Daguerre's claim to fame in a way lies in the fact that he also helped refine the process of creation of permamnent photographs by experimenting with silver iodide obtained by chemical reaction between silver coated copper plates and iodine.
What Daguerre found out was after exposing these plates to light for a couple of minutes and coating the plate with heated mercury vapour at about 75 degree celsius helped create an exact replica of the image. This process later came to be known as Daguerreotype by later inventors and physicists.
Louis Daguerre breathed his last on July 10, 1851 and the Google doodle today honours the inventor by showing a family picture of the inventor almost 160 years after his death and on his 224th birth anniversary.
Image: Louis Daguerre's 224th birthday