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.

   1 more example

   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.

   2017, Bob Berman, Zapped: From Infrared to X-rays, the Curious History of Invisible Light, Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 72

2. The process of making such photographs.
3. figurativelyobsoleteA faithful or exact representation or description.

   What was most admired was the facade of the great and ancient Gothic church of St. Mary,—which was reflected with such exactness that it appeared to be a daguerreotype design; so that all the lines and contours of the innumerable ornaments which cover this facade, were distinguished with ease.

   1846, editorial staff, “A City in the Air”, in Scientific American, series 1, Volume 2, Issue 13, page 101

present singular third person daguerreotypes · participle present daguerreotyping · participle past daguerreotyped · past daguerreotyped

1. intransitivetransitiveTo make a photograph using this process, to make a daguerreotype (of).
2. figurativelyobsoletetransitiveTo describe or represent exactly or faithfully; depict.

   [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.

   1861, E[lsa] J[ane] Guerin, chapter III, in An Autobiography. Mountain Charley, […], Dubuque, Ia.: […] [F]or the author, →OCLC, pages 19–20