Nicéphore Niépce, born March 21, 1795, would go on to produce the earliest surviving photograph made in a camera, 'View from the Window at Le Gras,' around 1826-27, using a process he called heliography. His experiments laid the technical groundwork that Louis Daguerre later refined into the daguerreotype.
Long before anyone could freeze a moment in time, Nicéphore Niépce spent years in his French country estate obsessed with a strange problem: could light itself be made to draw a picture, permanently, without a human hand? Working with pewter plates coated in light-sensitive bitumen, he exposed one plate to the view outside his workroom window for what is believed to have been a full eight-hour exposure.
The resulting image, blurry and ghostlike, shows a barn roof, a tree, and outbuildings — utterly mundane, and utterly revolutionary. It is the oldest surviving photograph made with a camera, predating the more famous daguerreotype by over a decade.
Niépce partnered with Louis Daguerre in 1829 to refine the process, but died in 1833 before seeing his work reach the public. Daguerre's later announcement of the daguerreotype in 1839 made him famous while Niépce faded into relative obscurity — a common fate for the quiet originator standing just behind history's credited inventor.