Google Doodle honours physicist Louis Daguerre

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Google Doodle honours physicist Louis Daguerre. Google, Google doodle, Louise Daguerre, Photography 0

18 November 2011 10:05 GMT / By Ben Crompton

Google has produced another Google doodle which pays tribute to Louis Daguerre on his 224th birthday; inventor of the daguerreotype his process enabled the fixing of a permanent image to a silver coated copper plate.

Although his invention was the first commercially successful photographic process, there was much controversy at the time of Daguerre's invention, as Englishman William Fox Talbot had also managed to fix images with his Calotype process. It was only due to patenting issues that Daguerre's method ended up being the more successful.

Unveiled at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1839, the process success thanks largely to it being freely available with many famous people sitting for daguerreotype photos, including Abraham Lincoln.

Despite this, it was Talbot's Calotype process that has stood the test of time and was the basis for much 19th and 20th century photography - the daguerreotype dying out in the middle of the 19th century.

The Doodle itself depicts a portrait of a family of five with their heads swapped for letters spelling out Google.

Via: google.co.uk

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