As a child he manifested interest for drawing and the sciences, as well as for the voyages of the great explorers to the New World and already as a 14-year-old boy he worked as a calligrapher and draftsman in Monaco, where his parents had been living since 1807.

Soon after his arrival, he got a job in a women's fashion store and then as a lithographer in a bookstore and printing shop, owned by his compatriot Pierre Plancher.

[6] This expedition lasts from June 1826 to March 1829, when, exhausted, sick, the survivors arrived in Rio, after a large journey in the Paraguay and Amazon Basin.

During the Langsdorff expedition, he had developed a new system of using musical notation to record the songs of birds and vocalizations of other animals, which he named "zoophonia".

[7] In 1833, with the help of a pharmacist friend, Joaquim Correa de Mello, Florence began to study ways of permanently fixing camera obscura images, which he named "photographia".

Unlike Wedgwood, who was unable to make photographs of real-world scenes with his camera or render the photograms that he did produce light-fast, Florence's notebooks indicate that he eventually succeeded in doing both.