In the 1720s, Johann Schulze discovered that exposing saturated chalk with nitric acid that contained some silver to the sun made it change color. He realized that is was the silver and nitric acid that caused the solution to change and was bale to stencil out letters on bottles. Since there was no way to make these stencils permanent they soon faded away. In the early 1800s, Thomas Wedgwood had successfully captured images, but had no way to keep them permanent. Swedish chemist Carl Scheele confirmed that the blackening effect of the silver salts was due to light and not heat. He proved this by pouring ammonia on the powder. He discovered the blackened silver was insoluble in ammonia. Thus, he discovered a fixer. He did not recognize the importance of his discovery to make a photograph permanent. .
The first successful permanent camera image was done by Joseph Niepce, a Frenchman. His son would etch drawings on the lithographer's stone and Niepce would do the chemicals. When his son went into the army he had to find a way to make the action of light etch the picture into the pewter plate. He succeeded in making one in 1822 using a camera obscura. This process was called heliography (sunwriting), and it took eight hours for the image to be recorded on the pewter plate. In 1833 Niepce, the inventor of photography, died. Daguerre had made a partnership with Niepce in 1829, and learned his methods. Daguerre set out to make the process practical. He made photographic plates which reduced the exposure time to thirty minutes. He improved the product and named it the "Daguerreotype." The Daguerreotype was greeted with enormous interest and became a craze overnight. The images were extremely sharp, and is better then a modern day print. Artists even saw the daguerreotype as a threat to themselves, and that possibly painting might go extinct all together. There were downsides to the Daguerreotype however.
