Nicéphore Niépce

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was born in France on 7 March 1765. He developed heliography, a technique that produced the world's oldest surviving products of a photographic process. With his older brother Claude, he conceived and built the Pyréolophore, one of the first internal combustion engines. But it was the camera work that outlasted him: sometime in the mid-1820s, he used a crude apparatus to make the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene, fixing onto a surface what had only ever been fleeting. He died on 5 July 1833, decades before the medium he pioneered would reshape how the w…