Ultimately, the photographic process came about from a series of refinements and improvements in the first 20 years.
He decided to try to record by chemical means the images he observed, and by 1835 he had a workable technique.

English photographer and inventor Thomas Wedgwood is believed to have been the first person to have thought of creating permanent pictures by capturing camera images on material coated with a light-sensitive chemical. In America, by 1851 a broadsheet by daguerreotypist Augustus Washington was advertising prices ranging from 50 cents to $10. Chapter 4 DOCUMENTATION OBJECTS AND EVENTS 1839-1890 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. Davy seems not to have continued the experiments. [24], The oldest surviving photograph of the image formed in a camera was created by Niépce in 1826 or 1827. Chapter 1 THE EARLY YEARS: TECHNOLOGY, VISION, USERS 1839-1875 .

The antecedents of photogenic drawing can be traced back to 1802, when Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, reported his experiments in recording images on paper or leather sensitized with silver nitrate. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century (with the arguable exception of a possibly photographic process used to create the mysterious shroud of Turin). Here is a brief timeline of the various breakthroughs with a description of its importance. Nineteenth-century experimentation with photographic processes frequently became proprietary. Davy added that the method could be used for objects that are partly opaque and partly transparent to create accurate representations of, for instance, "the woody fibres of leaves and the wings of insects". Then through the use of a rolling press, five tons of pressure were used to flatten the grains, enabling every one of them to capture and absorb color and their microscopic size allowing the illusion that the colors are merged. In 1816, Nicéphore Niépce, using paper coated with silver chloride, succeeded in photographing the images formed in a small camera, but the photographs were negatives, darkest where the camera image was lightest and vice versa, and they were not permanent in the sense of being reasonably light-fast; like earlier experimenters, Niépce could find no way to prevent the coating from darkening all over when it was exposed to light for viewing. (Carroll refers to the process as "Tablotype" in the story "A Photographer's Day Out". For example, upon first seeing the daguerreotype process demonstrated, the academic painter Paul Delaroche declared, “From today, painting is dead”; although he would later realize that the invention could actually aid artists, Delaroche’s initial reaction was indicative of that of many of his contemporaries. [7] However, there seem to be no historical records of any ideas even remotely resembling photography before 1725, despite early knowledge of light-sensitive materials and the camera obscura.[8].
[26] After a very long exposure in the camera (traditionally said to be eight hours, but now believed to be several days),[27] the bitumen was sufficiently hardened in proportion to its exposure to light that the unhardened part could be removed with a solvent, leaving a positive image with the light areas represented by hardened bitumen and the dark areas by bare pewter. New materials reduced the required camera exposure time from minutes to seconds, and eventually to a small fraction of a second; new photographic media were more economical, sensitive or convenient. [24], In partnership, Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône and Louis Daguerre in Paris refined the bitumen process,[28] substituting a more sensitive resin and a very different post-exposure treatment that yielded higher-quality and more easily viewed images. Polaroid introduces one-step instant photography with the SX-70 camera. The German-born, New Orleans photographer Theodore Lilienthal successfully sought legal redress in an 1881 infringement case involving his "Lambert Process" in the Eastern District of Louisiana.