How Early Could Photography Have Been Invented?

Given the right inventor with the right inclinations and ideas, could primitive photography techniques have come into existence decades or even centuries before the Daguerrotype did OTL? Could we have had photographs of people like George Washington or Napoleon?
 
In all Honesty

There were probably primitive cameras in China sometime around 400-500 BC. In the West it could have happened as early as 1700 since some guy discovered the photochemical effect. Mostly the problem would be figuring out how to wash out unchanged chemicals from whatever the image was captured on.
 
We need a meme.

I'm starting to develop a grudge against China, I really am. The more I learn about all the shit they just left in the dust I just get frustrated.
 
There were probably primitive cameras in China sometime around 400-500 BC. In the West it could have happened as early as 1700 since some guy discovered the photochemical effect. Mostly the problem would be figuring out how to wash out unchanged chemicals from whatever the image was captured on.
What prevented China from following up on their primitive cameras?
 
There were probably primitive cameras in China sometime around 400-500 BC. In the West it could have happened as early as 1700 since some guy discovered the photochemical effect. Mostly the problem would be figuring out how to wash out unchanged chemicals from whatever the image was captured on.
Really? Do you have any proof of that first claim?
 
Dating is a bit fuzzy but pseudo-Geber's works from somewhere around 1300 describes the first synthesis of nitric acid, which is necessary if one wants to produce the silver halogenide-salts that were the first photochemicals.

Interestingly, using aqua fortis (nitric acid) the alchemists could've also have stumbled upon such substances as nitrocellulose, nitroglycerin, and others...
 
The camera obscura was around for a long time, and silver salts were known to darken on exposure to light since 1727. Thomas Wedgewood made the first known photographs some time in the 1790s, but they quickly darkened to blackness due to the lack of a way to "fix" the images. So what is needed is to discover a means of fixing the photographic image. Sodium thiosulfate was not discovered by John Herschel to have fixative properties until 1819 (when he observed that it dissolves silver halides), although he did not experimentally test this on photographic images until 1839. If this had been noticed earlier, then stable photographic images could have been printed as early as the discovery of sodium thiosulfate. I tried to find out when this happened without success.
 
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