WI photographs and moving pictures invented earlier?

Titus_Pullo

Banned
The first known photograph taken of people using silver chemistry in the camera obscura is Daguerre's' view of the Boulevard du Temple which is a busy street in Paris showing a boy shining shoes. (1836) But the earliest known photograph was taken in 1826.
Suppose the daguerrotype technique was invented a century or two centuries earlier and by the late 1700s we get moving pictures which depicts the French Revolution, scenes from the Napoleonic Wars etc, how would it change history, art, mass media and technology for that matter?
 
The first known photograph taken of people using silver chemistry in the camera obscura is Daguerre's' view of the Boulevard du Temple which is a busy street in Paris showing a boy shining shoes. (1836) But the earliest known photograph was taken in 1826.
Suppose the daguerrotype technique was invented a century or two centuries earlier and by the late 1700s we get moving pictures which depicts the French Revolution, scenes from the Napoleonic Wars etc, how would it change history, art, mass media and technology for that matter?
Well, the change in the amount of science in the world to allow that to happen would probably matter far, far more than a few pictures. Figuring out the chemistry to make pictures looks trivial today, but it wasn't back then. I'd bet you couldn't do it at all with the chemistry available very much earlier.

You don't get a picture unless you can fix it - keep the rest of the silver halide particles from reacting. That was only discovered by Herschel in 1819, and he soon communicated that to e.g. Daguerre.
 
Yes, I believe that photography was invented nearly as early as it could have been. Possibly, somebody could have discovered fixation -- the crucial step in permanent photography -- up to a decade earlier, but the needed materials simply did not exist earlier than that (to my best recollection).

The other steps were already known. From Wikipedia:

Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher Mo Ti and Greek mathematicians Aristotle and Euclid described a pinhole camera in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. In the 6th century AD, Byzantine mathematician Anthemius of Tralles used a type of camera obscura in his experiments.

Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965 in Basra – c. 1040 in Cairo) studied the camera obscura and pinhole camera, Albertus Magnus (1193/1206–80) discovered silver nitrate, and Georges Fabricius (1516–71) discovered silver chloride. Daniel Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1568. Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694.

John Herschel was working with the action of sodium thiosulphate ("hypo") on silver salts in 1819, so if he had been a bit luckier he could have beaten Niepce by a half decade or so.
 
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