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Worlds first camera — The 1839 Susse Frères Daguerréotype

I came across what might be the first camera you could actually buy at the excellent Westlicht permanent exhibition in Vienna. The museum displays an impressive collection of 360 cameras and also hosts a 3D camera exhibition of 100 historically significant cameras.

The museum’s centrepiece and most valuable specimen, displayed as the world’s first commercially produced camera, is the “Susse Frères Daguerréotype”. This is the story of that camera and the race to sell the world’s first camera.

On 19 August 1839, physicist François Arago stood before the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris to reveal the details of a brand-new process and apparatus, first announced in January. The hall was packed, and those who could not get in waited outside on the Quai de Conti to learn what had been said.

The Contenders

Two months earlier, on 22 June, the man who put his name to the camera, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, had signed contracts with two Paris firms to manufacture the camera. One was Alphonse Giroux et Cie of the Rue du Coq Saint-Honoré, an important Parisian manufacturer of luxury furniture and accessories. Giroux was Daguerre’s brother-in-law. The other was Maison Susse Frères, at 31 Place de la Bourse, a firm with a foundry business and a shop selling similar merchandise.

Both were granted the right to build the camera to Daguerre’s plans, though not on the same terms. Giroux’s cameras were endorsed by Daguerre and marketed on the basis that they were constructed under his supervision. Susse Frères cameras were produced according to Daguerre’s plans.

As a result, Giroux’s cameras carried an oval plaque bearing Daguerre’s own signature and a red wax seal dated with the year. Susse Frère’s octagonal label stated that the camera had been made to the plans lodged at the Ministry of the Interior.

The Timeline

Shortly after the Daguerreotype was announced, both firms went to press. Here is the Daguerreotype/Giroux/Susse Frères timeline, according to Photobibliothek.ch, a private library on the history of photography that houses the original adverts.

Date	Event	Significance
6 Jan	Gazette de France publishes H. Gaucheraud’s “Nouvelle découverte”, describing Daguerre’s invention.	The first public announcement of photography, one day before Arago’s presentation.
7 Jan	François Arago announces Daguerre’s invention to the Académie des Sciences.	The first official scientific announcement.
Jan–June	Extensive press coverage follows in France and abroad, alongside rival priority claims from Talbot, Gerber and others.	Daguerre’s process becomes an international story months before the technical details are released.
19 Aug	Arago and Daguerre publicly reveal the process in Paris.	The operating details become public and the French state effectively releases the process for public use.
21 Aug	Gazette de France carries an advertisement from Alphonse Giroux & Cie.	Subscription/advance advertisement. Giroux says the apparatus is manufactured under Daguerre’s direction and will be accompanied by explanatory instructions.
23 Aug	Gazette de France carries a Susse Frères advertisement: “On souscrit au Daguerréotype chez Susse frères…”	Susse Frères follows Giroux by only two days, again soliciting subscriptions/orders rather than announcing stock immediately available.
25 Aug	Le Voleur reports extraordinary public interest at the Institut de France; crowds had arrived three hours before the presentation and three specimen daguerreotypes remained on display.	Demonstrates the intensity of the publicity surrounding the commercial launch.
6 Sep	Susse Frères and bookseller Delloye advertise Daguerre’s manual under its full title, Historique et description pratique des procédés du Daguerréotype et du Diorama, price 2 francs. Susse also advertises the complete daguerreotype apparatus with accessories for 350 francs.	The wording changes to “En vente” — on sale.
7 Sep	Giroux advertises Daguerre’s manual under its full title for 2 francs, with engraved plates, stating that Giroux is the only house making apparatus under Daguerre’s direction.	Giroux’s corresponding full commercial advertisement appears the day after Susse’s.

Giroux appears to win the publicity race with its advertisement of 21 August, but Susse Frères is the first to offer availability. On 6 September, Susse Frères says both the manual and 350-franc apparatus are “en vente”. Giroux’s comparable full-title advertisement appears on 7 September.

The Other Race

There was another race in progress. While Daguerre and his supporters were preparing to reveal the new process to the world, across the Channel English gentleman-scientist William Henry Fox Talbot had been pursuing photographic experiments of his own. News of Daguerre’s discovery, announced on January 7th, though without details of the process, travelled quickly.

Within weeks the news had reached Fox Talbot in England, who immediately recognised that Daguerre’s claims overlapped with the photographic experiments he had been conducting privately for several years. Fox Talbot responded quickly. On January 25th he exhibited examples of his own ‘photogenic drawings’ at the Royal Institution in London. Four days later, he wrote to the French physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot asserting his prior work, and on January 31st presented his paper, Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, to the Royal Society.

The First Sale

Back in Paris in Autumn 1839, who rang up the first sale of a Daguerreotype? The available evidence isn’t conclusive, but I would bet that Susse Frères licensed but unendorsed position would create greater urgency, and the unsupervised nature of the manufacturing would probably make it a little faster, enabling the firm to get ahead by a few days. This is no more than a hypothesis, but not an unreasonable one.

The two cameras were similar, though the Giroux cost a little more. Both were wooden sliding-box whole plate designs mounted with a hand-ground achromatic lens made by Charles Chevalier. The Giroux cameras were made of hardwood with a natural varnished finish, while the Susse Frères camera was made of a softer wood and painted black.

The new Daguerreotype photographic process produced a small, short-lived occupational ecosystem that combined the skills of chemist, metalworker, optician, photographer, and portraitist. Several stages of the process, and thus more than one of these new daguerreotype jobs, were distinctly hazardous. You can read about this in the article The Short Lived, Hazardous Jobs of the Daguerrotype Era.

Technical specification

Susse Frères **Le Daguerréotype, 1839**	Susse Frères **Le Daguerréotype, 1839**
Type	Sliding-box camera.
Plate format	167 × 216 mm, full/whole plate, approximately 6.5 × 8.5 in.
Body	Softwood, black stained/finished; brass fittings.
Interior	Black velvet lining to camera and internal doors.
Focus	Rear sliding-box arrangement; ground-glass screen interchangeable with plate holder.
Lens	Charles Chevallier achromatic; approximately 38 cm focal length.
Working aperture	Approximately f/14.
Exposure control	Pivoting/swivelling brass plate at the front of the lens.
Light control at rear	Two inward-opening doors operable from outside so the plate could be inserted while the camera remained light-tight.

Source: Westlicht camera auction

Today, about a dozen Giroux cameras are known to exist, most of which are in museums. There is one in the History of Science Museum, Oxford, and a copy in the National Science and Media Museum. There are also examples in museums in Munich, Barcelona, Tokyo and New York.

The Westlicht example is the only authenticated example of the Susse Frères. This appeared from an attic in Germany in 2007, so for most of photography’s history it was assumed there were no surviving Susse Frères, and that perhaps the advertisements referred to a production that had either never happened, or to a handful of examples that had been lost.

Whether it was actually the first camera sold remains impossible to prove. Giroux advertised first, but Susse Frères appears to have offered its camera for sale first. In the first days of September 1839, someone with a few hundred francs to spend walked into one of those two shops and purchased the world’s first camera offered for sale.

We don’t know which shop it was. But the sole surviving Susse Frères makes the more popular claim that the Giroux was the world’s first commercially produced camera rather less certain; and the race to sell the world’s first camera considerably more interesting.

The first camera lens specifically for photography was an achromatic landscape lens produced by French optician and instrument maker Charles Chevalier‘s optical firm. Chevalier produced lenses for photographic pioneers Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre, who both used his lenses for their ground-breaking work in photography.

I researched this story because two of the earliest cameras in my small collection, the Kodak No 2 Folding Autographic Brownie and the Kodak No 2 Folding Pocket Brownie Model B, both used the same design as the very first lens and I wanted to understand its origin.

To tell the story of that first camera lens we need go back to earlier in the nineteenth century. Please note that this is the story of the first lens designed for use with a camera, not the first lens, which was created much earlier. Experiments with lenses go back to the 10th century Arabian scientist Abu Ali Hasan!

Foundations – The Meniscus Lens

Lenses used in the camera’s ancestor, the Camera Obscura, were simple biconvex lenses. This is a glass element that curves outwards on each side, like those in magnifying glasses. In 1812, the eminent English Scientist William Hyde Wollaston found that a meniscus shaped lens was a significant improvement to lens performance.

A meniscus is a curve in the surface of a molecular substance (such as water) when it touches another material. This shape provided a much flatter field and eliminated much of the distortion compared to the simple biconvex lenses.

The First Effective Camera Lens – The Achromatic Meniscus

In 1829, Chevalier created an achromatic version of the meniscus lens – a two-element lens made from crown glass and flint glass which have compensating optical properties. An achromatic lens addresses the problem of achromatic aberration.

An achromatic aberration is one of many possible optical aberrations in lenses. These are performance deviations from a perfect, mathematical model. They are not caused by manufacturing flaws but are inherent in lens design and are due to the properties of light such as diffraction and refraction. Other examples include spherical aberration, astigmatic aberrations and field curvature.

Chevalier’s lens had addressed one of the biggest challenges of early lens design which is reducing achromatic aberration – getting red and blue wavelengths of light to focus on the same plane.

This what an achromatic lens does, and it is necessary because the colours of light with shorter wavelengths, like blue, travel more slowly through most transparent materials than colours with longer wavelengths like red – resulting in different focal lengths – resulting in focusing problems.

George Eastman of Kodak fame said of Chevalier’s lens of 1839 “as he was accustomed to achromatizing all of his lenses, Chevalier naturally thought of achromatizing the Wollaston lens too.” This was unsurprising as Chevalier came from an optical dynasty whose founder (Charles’ grandfather) had invented the achromatic microscope.

Chevalier’s lens also reduced field curvature and produced a much flatter image plane. Field Curvature causes a flat object to appear sharp only in a certain part(s) of the frame, instead of being uniformly sharp across the frame.

An Unfortunate Side Effect

Chevalier’s design however, had an unfortunate side effect – spherical aberration. This means the outer parts of a lens do not bring light rays into the same focus as the central part.

Chevalier had effectively reduced one problem that caused blurring whilst accentuating another! However, while both spherical aberration and field curvature lead to image blur, there are visual differences.

Those differences lie in the distribution of sharpness across the image. Spherical aberration tends to cause a general reduction in sharpness, especially towards the edges, while field curvature results in different parts of the image being in focus at different distances.

Stopping it

There is relatively simple workaround to spherical aberration, which is to put a narrow aperture stop in front of the lens. Whilst significantly reducing the aberration, the stop lets in less light it, making it ‘slower’. F14 was the fastest of the two apertures offered!

The Landscape Lens

The Chevalier lens, Susse Frére Daguerreotype

A slow lens produced exposure lengths that were rather long for portraits, but Chevalier’s lens was much better suited to landscapes and became known as the “French landscape lens” or “landscape lens”. It sold with almost every early Daguerreotype camera.

You can read the story of the first Daguerreotypes in The Race To Sell The World’s First Camera.

The Portrait Lens

Chevalier worked on a faster lens design but it was the Petzval lens that provided the first portrait lens. It was also the first mathematically calculated precision objective in the history of photography. Previously optics had been ground and polished based on experience. The lens was developed by the Hungarian mathematics professor Joseph Petzval in 1840, who had the assistance of a team of artillery gunners and 3 corporals at his disposal. This was one of the few professions in which mathematical calculations were made. The lens was extremely fast, offering an f3.6 aperture and was produced by the Voigtländer company.

The Legacy of the First Camera Lens Design

The Landscape lens was selected by George Eastman as the optics for the Brownie camera due to its simplicity, and price/performance. A well-corrected design at the Brownie’s f/16 or f/22 or so, was quite sufficient for sharp-looking images for the contact prints of the time.

Accordingly, many of Kodak’s early low cost cameras typically came with either simple meniscus lenses, dual meniscus lenses (the ‘periscopic’ type) or achromatic meniscus lenses.

Some offered a choice a better lenses from third parties, such as Bausch and Lomb’s Rapid Rectilinear. The Kodak No 2 Folding Autographic Brownie shown here offered this as an option. Here are some of the Kodak cameras fitted with these lens types:

The Kodak (periscopic meniscus)
No 1 and No 2 Kodak (periscopic meniscus)
The Brownie (meniscus)
No 1 Brownie (meniscus)
No 2, 2A, 2B, No 2 C Brownie (meniscus)
No 3 Brownie – Meniscus achromatic

Source: Kodak Camera, The First Hundred Years by Brian Coe

Despite an antique design, its low cost and ease of manufacturing kept the meniscus lens going in the the Kodak stable for many years. A late examples is the Kodak Brownie Hawkeye Flash, an all plastic box camera produced between 1950 and 1961, with an f/15 single element meniscus lens. Another is the Brownie Fiesta of 1962-1966 with an f/11 meniscus lens.

Tag: Susse Frères

The Race to Sell the World’s First Camera