Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre

“The images are delineated with mathematical accuracy.”

“I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.”

“The daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary, it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself.”

“The discovery I have made and which I call the Daguerreotype, consists in the spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura.”

“In perfecting this invention, my object has been not so much to make a pecuniary profit by it, as to give a new art to my country.”