Joseph Nicéphore Niépce

Hello! My name is Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, but you can call me Nicéphore. I was born a long, long time ago, on March 7th, 1765, in a beautiful town in France. Even when I was a little boy, I loved figuring out how things worked. I was always curious and spent my days dreaming up new inventions. My best friend was my older brother, Claude, and we loved to build amazing things together.

My brother Claude and I had a big idea. We wanted to make a boat move without using sails or oars! We worked hard in our workshop and in 1807, we invented something incredible: one of the world's very first engines! We called it the Pyréolophore. It was so exciting to see our boat chugging along the river all by itself, powered by our invention.

After our engine, I became fascinated with a new idea: capturing a picture made by sunlight. I knew about a special dark box called a 'camera obscura' that could project an image of the outside onto a wall. But the image would always disappear! I wanted to find a way to make it stay forever. I experimented for years and finally, around 1826, I did it! I pointed my camera out of my workshop window and captured the view. It was the world's very first photograph, and it took more than eight hours for the sunlight to draw the picture!

My invention, which I called 'Heliography' or 'sun-drawing,' was just the beginning. Soon, I met another inventor named Louis Daguerre, and in 1829, we became partners to make the process even better. I lived to be 68 years old, and though I didn't get to see how popular my idea would become, I was proud of what I started. Every time you snap a photo with a camera or a phone, you are using a little bit of the magic I discovered so long ago—the magic of capturing a moment with light.