It was Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, born at Corneilles, France, in 1789, and who died in 1851, who was the first to reduce to practice the invention called after his name. He was a brilliant scene painter, and especially successful in painting panoramas. In 1822, assisted by Bouton, he had invented the _diorama_, by which coloured lights representing the various changes of the day and season were thrown upon the canvasses in his beautiful panoramas of Rome, London, Naples and other great cities. Several years previous to 1839 he and Joseph N. Niepce, learning of the efforts of chemists in that line, began independently, and then together, to develop the art of obtaining permanent copies of objects produced by the chemical action of the sun. Niepce died while they were thus engaged. Daguerre prosecuted his researches alone, and toward the close of 1838 his success was such that he made known his invention to Arago, and Arago announced it in an eloquent and enthusiastic address to the French Academy of Sciences in January 1839. It at once excited great attention, which was heightened by the pictures produced by the new process. The French Government, in consideration of the details of the invention and its improvements being made public and on request of Daguerre, granted him an annuity and one also to Niepce’s son. At first only pictures of natural objects were taken; but in learning of Daguerre’s process Dr. John William Draper of New York, a native of England and adopted son of America, the brilliant author of _The Intellectual Development of Europe_, and other great works, in the same year, 1839, took portraits of persons by photography, and he was the first to do this. Draper was also the first in America to reveal the wonders of the spectroscope; and he was first to show that each colour of the spectrum had its own peculiar chemical effect. This was in 1847.