In a book written in 1844 Marc Gaudin gives us an eyewitness account of the excitement with which the announcement of the Daguerreotype process five years earlier had been greeted:
"The Palace...was stormed by a swarm of the curious at the memorable sitting on 19 August, 1839, where the process was at long last divulged.
Although I came two hours beforehand, like many others I was barred from the hall (and) was...with the crowd for everything that happened outside.
At one moment an excited man comes out; he is surrounded, he is questioned, and he answers with a know-it-all air, that bitumen of Judea and lavender oil is the secret. Questions are multiplied but as he knows nothing more, we are reduced to talking about bitumen of Judea and lavender oil.
Soon a crowd surrounds a newcomer, more startled than the last. He tells us with no further comment that it is iodine and mercury...
Finally, the sitting is over, the secret divulged...
A few days later, opticians' shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first trial formed a silhouette of roof tops against the sky. He went into ecstasies over chimneys, counted over and over roof tiles and chimney bricks - in a word, the technique was so new that even the poorest plate gave him unspeakable joy....."
© Robert Leggat, 1999.