Today in 1839, Samuel F. B. Morse and Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre met in Daguerre’s studio, in Paris, France.
Jeff Rosenheim, “‘A Palace for the Sun’: Early Photography in New York City”: “Morse, a celebrated portrait painter, wrote to his brother: ‘[The Daguerreotype] is one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age…’”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”: “Morse in turn invited Daguerre to a demonstration of the electric telegraph, and on the very day that they met this second time, Daguerre’s Diorama–and with it his notes and early daguerreotypes–burned to the ground. This tragic coincidence forever linked the fate of these two figures and ingratiated Daguerre to Morse…
The Daguerreotype… has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality. The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture… [it is the] invention of the mirror with a memory…”