1765-1833

French Inventor

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, born in 1765 in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, was the first to make negative photographic images on paper and positive photographic images on metal plates. He also invented a method of making multiple copies of existing pictures.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. (Corbis Corporation. Reproduced by permission.)

As a young man, Niépce served as an officer in the French army under Napoleon Bonaparte. After poor health forced him to resign from the military, he settled in Nice, where he married and became a government administrator. He returned to his family's estate in Chalon-sur-Saône in 1801 and, with his brother Claude, devoted his life to experimentation and invention.

The brothers' first invention, patented in 1807, was an internal combustion engine they called the pyréolophore. The engine used the same piston...