Such an idea could scarcely have occurred until after the invention of the camera obscura; but when looking at the beautiful pictures focused on the screen of that instrument, it became an object of longing desire to fix them there.
To trace the history of Photography from its earliest beginnings, we must go back to the days of the alchemists, who were the discoverers of the influence of light in darkening the salts of silver, on which all photographic processes on paper depend. That property of light was noticed in 1566, and it induced the speculative philosophers of that day to conceive that luminous rays contained a sulphurous principle which transmitted the forms of matter. Homberg, more than a century afterwards, misled by this action of the sun's rays, supposed that they insinuated themselves into the particles of bodies, and increased their weight; and Sir Isaac Newton also entertained a similar opinion.
The influence of the solar rays in facilitating the crystallization of saltpetre and sal ammoniac, was shown by Petit in 1722; and in 1777, the distinguished chemist Scheele discovered that the violet rays of the spectrum possess greater power in producing those changes than any other. A solution of nitrate of silver, then called "the acid of silver," was known to be peculiarly susceptible to the action of those rays. The experiment by which it was illustrated consisted in pouring the solution on chalk, which became blackened by exposure to light. These discoveries were made by Scheele in his endeavours to find in light the source of "phlogiston"--that _ignis fatuus_ of the chemists of the last century. We thus perceive, in the first steps towards the invention of Photography, one of the many instances of the discovery of truth in the search after error.
At the beginning of the present century, Mr. Wedgwood, the celebrated porcelain manufacturer, undertook a series of experiments to fix the images of the camera, assisted by Mr. (afterwards Sir Humphry) Davy. They so far succeeded as to impress the images on the screen, but unfortunately they had not the power of preserving the paper from being blackened all over when exposed for a short time to the light. "Nothing," said Sir Humphry Davy, in his account of these experiments, "but a method of preventing the unshaded parts of the delineation from being coloured by exposure to light is wanting to render this process as useful as it is elegant."