Exceedingly adept at his skill of theatrical illusion, he became a celebrated designer for the theatre, and later came to invent the diorama, which opened in Paris in July 1822.

In 1829, Daguerre partnered with Nicéphore Niépce, an inventor who had produced the world's first heliograph in 1822 and the oldest surviving camera photograph in 1826 or 1827.

At a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Beaux Arts on 7 January of that year, the invention was announced and described in general terms, but all specific details were withheld.

Under assurances of strict confidentiality, Daguerre explained and demonstrated the process only to the Academy's perpetual secretary François Arago, who proved to be an invaluable advocate.

After the death of Niépce in 1833, Daguerre concentrated his attention on the light-sensitive properties of silver salts, which had previously been demonstrated by Johann Heinrich Schultz and others.

For the process which was eventually named the daguerreotype, he exposed a thin silver-plated copper sheet to the vapour given off by iodine crystals, producing a coating of light-sensitive silver iodide on the surface.

The resulting visible image was then "fixed" (made insensitive to further exposure to light) by removing the unaffected silver iodide with concentrated and heated salt water.

The surface was subject to tarnishing by prolonged exposure to the air and was so soft that it could be marred by the slightest friction, so a daguerreotype was almost always sealed under glass before being framed (as was commonly done in France) or mounted in a small folding case (as was normal in the UK and US).

At the time of its introduction, the process required exposures lasting ten minutes or more for brightly sunlit subjects, so portraiture was an impractical ordeal.

Samuel Morse was astonished to learn that daguerreotypes of the streets of Paris did not show any people, horses or vehicles, until he realized that due to the long exposure times all moving objects became invisible.

The paper-based calotype process, introduced by Henry Fox Talbot in 1841, allowed the production of an unlimited number of copies by simple contact printing, but it had its own shortcomings—the grain of the paper was obtrusively visible in the image, and the extremely fine detail of which the daguerreotype was capable was not possible.

If it is viewed while a brightly lit sheet of white paper is held so as to be seen reflected in its mirror-like metal surface, the daguerreotype image will appear as a relatively faint negative—its dark and light areas reversed—instead of a normal positive.

Other types of photographic images are almost never on polished metal and do not exhibit this peculiar characteristic of appearing positive or negative depending on the lighting and reflections.

Unbeknownst to either inventor, Daguerre's developmental work in the mid-1830s coincided with photographic experiments being conducted by William Henry Fox Talbot in England.

Talbot had succeeded in producing a "sensitive paper" impregnated with silver chloride and capturing small camera images on it in the summer of 1835, though he did not publicly reveal this until January 1839.

Talbot was unaware that Daguerre's late partner Niépce had obtained similar small camera images on silver-chloride-coated paper nearly twenty years earlier.

Talbot chemically stabilized his images to withstand subsequent inspection in daylight by treating them with a strong solution of common salt.

The United Kingdom was thereby uniquely denied France's free gift, and became the only country where the payment of license fees was required.

"Transforming impressions, mood changes, and movements were produced by a system of shutters and screens that allowed light to be projected- from behind- on alternately separate sections of an image painted on a semi-transparent backdrop".

The auditorium was a cylindrical room and had a single opening in the wall, similar to a proscenium arch, through which the audience could watch a "scene".