daguerreotype

From French daguerréotype. Named after French artist Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) who announced the process in 1839. Daguerre developed the process after some years of collaborations with French chemist Nicéphore Niépce.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /dəˈɡɛɹ.(ɪ.)əʊˌtaɪp/
• (US) IPA^(key): /dəˈɡɛɚ.(i.)oʊˌtaɪp/, /dəˈɡɛɚ.(i.)əˌtaɪp/

daguerreotype (plural daguerreotypes)

1. An early type of photograph created by exposing a silver surface which has previously been exposed to either iodine vapor or iodine and bromine vapors; such a photograph.
   • 2017, Bob Berman, Zapped: From Infrared to X-rays, the Curious History of Invisible Light, Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 72:

     The awakening of science to this new way of seeing the cosmos began with Johann Ritter in 1801. By 1815, scientists found that Ritter's “chemical rays” [ultraviolet rays] darkened not just silver chloride but also many other kinds of metallic salts. Between 1826 and 1837, Nicéphore Niépce, credited with taking the first successful photograph, in 1827, and Louis Daguerre, the most famous photographic innovator of his day, found that silver iodide was especially light sensitive, and they used this discovery as the basis for their early work, which even then had begun to gain international notice. By 1842, others found that when sunlight hit a gelatin emulsion containing silver iodide, soon to be called a daguerreotype plate, it induced a photochemical reaction. Practical photography was born.

2. The process of making such photographs.
3. (obsolete, figurative) A faithful or exact representation or description.
   • translation, "This objection also seems inappropriate since I never tried to establish a genealogical table of exceptional individuals, nor was I concerned in forming an intellectual daguerreotype of the scholar or naturalist of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.", quoting Michel Foucault, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews, Ithaka, NY, →ISBN, What is an Author? (1969), page 115:

• daguerreotyper
• daguerreotypy

daguerreotype (third-person singular simple present daguerreotypes, present participle daguerreotyping, simple past and past participle daguerreotyped)

1. (transitive, intransitive) To make a photograph using this process, to make a daguerreotype (of).
2. (transitive, obsolete, figurative) To describe or represent exactly or faithfully; depict.
   • 1861, E[lsa] J[ane] Guerin, chapter III, in An Autobiography. Mountain Charley, […], Dubuque, Ia.: […] [F]or the author, →OCLC, pages 19–20:

     [H]e scanned my countenance with a pair of fierce, blood-shot eyes that I knew would daguerreotype my appearance indellibly^[sic] and faithfully upon his mind.