Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre

“The images are delineated with mathematical accuracy.”

“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.”

“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.”