One December afternoon in 1838, Louis climbed the stairs to his laboratory. The room was a clutter of chemical flasks and decanters. The day before, he had exposed a plate of a street view and placed it inside a desk drawer. It was a dismal picture—the light was bleak and the cloud-capped sky was gauzy and pale; the buildings and lampposts were smears of charcoal. He had exposed and developed the plate in pursuit of the right chemical fixing agent. He’d tried a new mixture of petroleum and vinegar and left the unsatisfactory plate to cure overnight in the drawer of his workbench. Now, when he removed the image, he saw immediately that something had changed. The edges of the buildings had darkened; the clouds were absorbed into the silver skin of the plate. Instead of fading, as was usually the case, the image had etched deeper.
Louis began rifling through the drawer to see what could have affected the plate in this way. There were a dozen other items in there—phials of iodine, petri dishes of glycerin, mineral oils, spools of wire, theater ticket stubs, mixing inks, a defunct brass compass, and a damaged thermometer he used to measure the temperature of chemicals. He spent the rest of the day conducting a process-of-elimination test. He exposed a plate, removed all the items bar one from the drawer, and then left the plate to fix inside the drawer. The fifth item he left in the drawer was the thermometer, which he now saw had a fracture in its glass casing. Tiny globules of mercury had bled out of the glass and gathered in the seams of the thermometer. Within an hour, the new plate was fixed. He did another test, then another. He smashed the glass tube and emptied the mercury into a petri dish. Same effect, only faster. He gathered his chemistry and alchemy books and rifled through the pages that mentioned mercury. Melts at –39 degrees. Boils at 357 degrees. Insoluble in water. Here it is, he thought, the Trojan horse.
He told nobody about what he’d found. From under a loose floorboard he produced a wad of francs and went out into the street. There was a hatter factory behind the Left Bank, beside an abattoir, where he knew they used enormous vats of mercury to fasten hide into hats. He would buy himself a barrel.
A guard sent him into the factory in pursuit of the foreman, a stout-chested man in overalls. Louis walked down a succession of cooling and stretching aisles, where women in bonnets handled strips of animal hide. The smell was ghastly—a combination of offal and the high, sweet chemistry of tanning solutions. A woman pointed him towards the mercury room where the hats were taken for bolstering.
It was a low-ceilinged room with no windows or ventilation. There was a sunken area where enormous copper urns bubbled above wood fires and thick mercury steam rose towards the ceiling. Upon entering, Louis heaved a cough. The air was liquid, hot, and burned on the way in. A motley collection of men, women, and children dipped hats on wooden paddles in and out of copper boilers, their faces drenched in sweat. There was a stupefied look on their faces. Later, Louis would recall this tableau and imagine that the mercury had literally fixed their faces, etched their countenances pale, waxy, and hangdog. But for now he had discovered something wondrous, and no amount of squalor would dissuade him from his entitlement.
The foreman swiveled his torso slightly when Louis called out to him. It was an economy of movement that suggested orders barked from the side of the mouth. It reminded Louis of Marius, the head apprentice and prop boy from all those years ago.
“I have come to buy a barrel of mercury,” said Louis. “How much is it?’
The man wiped the great shelf of his forehead with the back of his wrist. “You a hatter?”
“Not exactly,” said Louis.
“What, then?”
“Does it matter? I am willing to pay whatever you ask.”
“Is you now?” The man clicked his teeth together and yelled something incomprehensible to a boy in the corner. When he turned his head back to Louis, he inspected his shoes and hat.
“Don’t sell the quicksilver. Hard to come by, it is.”
“May I speak with the owner?”
The foreman did not like this tack. “If you catch a ship and go to Morocco, you might.”
“I see.”
“Yes, you see.” The foreman walked off, wiping his hands on his thighs. Louis followed. He reached into his pockets and produced the wad of francs.
“There is five hundred francs here,” said Louis. “I don’t know what it costs you, but I wager it’s not that. You may keep the difference.” He held the faded francs in front of the man’s chest.
The man involuntarily extended his eyebrows like archers’ bows. “Quicksilver don’t come in barrels. It’s a keg you wants. And heavy as lead it is.” He snatched the money from Louis and used his chin to point to a row of metal kegs, each one painted with the symbol Hg. Louis turned to ask the foreman for some assistance carrying the keg, or to hold it until he could bring his wagon, but the man had disappeared.
Louis rolling a metal keg of mercury through the Paris streets. Passersby thought he was a drunkard with a keg of home-brewed beer. A policeman stopped him, suspecting it was a gunpowder keg, that revolution might be fuming in the garrets. Louis was all politeness and lies, masking the ridiculousness of his predicament. Yes, Officer. No, monsieur, not gunpowder. Yes, I’m a hatter. He hunched and pushed the keg, rolling it up and down gutters, the metal clinking on the macadam, his back aching, the ferment of boiled mercury still in the back of his throat. He arrived home and heaved the keg to his shoulder. He grunted up the stairs like a rag-and-bone merchant, complaining and panting with every step. The sound of the laboratory dead bolt sliding into place was supremely satisfying. Louis sat on the floor, his hands blistered and red. The keg rested on its end, and now he saw the dented tin and wondered how he ever got the monstrosity home. He laughed at the prospect of the keg rupturing on the way, a gushing river of quicksilver coming down on the cobblestone. They might have arrested him. He allowed himself another exhausted laugh, and soon he noticed his top hat was torn on one side, and this prompted another chuckle, this time at his own expense, at the fool in the ragged hat loping his way through the boulevards. He had never felt so ridiculous and lucky.
He worked all day and night, refining the process. He decanted mercury from the keg into metal trays. These became his mercury baths, heated on the wood-burning stove and taken into the confines of the darkroom. If he angled the exposed image above the hot mercury, passing it back and forth, he obtained the best result. He watched the mercury vapors draw line and edge onto his plates. The air thickened around him, a metallic brume that watered his eyes. It had an elusive smell, something acrid but fleeting, like iron railings in the rain. It caught in the back of his throat, and sometimes he felt faint. But the images themselves made this discomfort inconsequential—here was time stolen, wafered, and pressed onto silvered copper; here were nature’s blueprints, transcripts of light, from the finial point of a flagpole to the tweed edge of a man’s jacket, all of it replicated in nuance, shadow, and substance.
After several months he perfected the bathing technique and was already showing the first signs of mercury poisoning—stomach cramps, headaches, soreness in the mouth and jaw. But what ran parallel to this progression of symptoms was the infatuation he developed for quicksilver. The liquid metal adorned his workshop and apartment; it glossed from jars along the windowsill, it lay beaded in the washroom sink. He didn’t want to be without it and carried a phial of mercury around his neck at all times. In the middle of the day he would think about its silver sheen, about the way it defied chemistry and, like glass, stood between liquid and solid, between substance and reflection. He was, in a sense, in love again.
Madness began as a seduction. There were portents and omens; everything reminded him of his beloved. The world was infused with quicksilver—the Paris winter fogs were a lambent metallic gray, fixing pedestrians’ images onto glass shopfronts; jars of rainwater gave off vaporous fumes; the coins in his pocket were silvered with it. He walked the streets, jangling his coins. He knew the process would carry his name—D-A-G-U-E-R-R-E-O-T-Y-P-E—and there was something scientific and stately about it, like the regal sound of geological ages or the Latin names of plants. The impossible vanity of it, he thought, but then he was struck by a sense of entitlement, of being chosen. He wrote a letter to François Arago at the Academie des Sciences, declaring his process with such phrases as your humble servant and an endowment for His Majesty. What he didn’t write, but wanted to, was the simple and brash truth: I see things others don’t; I always have.
Now Louis made a quick ascent. Here was the extended hand of fame. On August 19, 1839, nine months after hauling the keg of mercury across Paris, Louis Daguerre stood with Niépce’s son—the elder Niépce had recently died—and François Arago in the great chamber of the Academy. The announcements in the newspapers had brought heavy crowds. People bustled into the baroque meeting rooms three hours before the sitting was due to commence. Louis opted not to make his own presentation, being satisfied with what he had set out in a pamphlet. He let Arago discuss the history of optics, the methods of the process, the applications for astronomy, art, and geology. When Louis heard the process referred to as the daguerreotype, he felt a sting of embarrassment; all the geriatric men of the Academy—patent-holders with hooded eyes, aldermen with aquiline noses and snuff pouches—peered in his direction. The vanity, the gall. But by the time Arago had woven a tale with the exactitude of a man who could prove the existence of planets with numbers and Greek letters, there was a palpable wonder and silence in the vast gallery. The process, said Arago, though seemingly mystical, was quite simple: a plate of silver upon copper is sensitized, then iodized, until it assumes a tint of pale yellow; the plate is inserted into a camera obscura, the aperture opened for a varying length of time, and then the plate is removed and the image is fixed with mercury vapor before being exalted in daylight. It was an exact replica of the scene before the camera, sketched by the sun herself. Arago held several of Louis’s plates high above the lectern and then passed them around the room. Monocles came out; the old vanguard, the owl-faced men in frockcoats and gold-buttoned waistcoats, exchanged their Tartarean frowns for expressions of stifled awe. People had come in from the countryside—cattle dealers and their wives, gentry from the coast—and these folks clucked and cheered with delight, puzzled audibly over the verisimilitude of human faces and cottages before them. A band of Louis’s old theater buddies—under-studies and scenic painters—started a chant of Honor to Daguerre. Louis, wedged between Arago and Niépce’s son, looked out at the crowd from the front of the room, at the nobles and workingmen, all of them rapt at the possibility of their own images enveloped in skins of silver. A sea of doffed hats. A standing ovation rippled through the crowd. He felt Arago’s congratulatory hand at his shoulder. He shook hands with Niépce’s son, Louis’s other hand on top, sealing the shake in the manner of diplomats and mayors. A profound levity overtook his whole body. Louis took a very slow bow.
Within an hour of the presentation, Paris was crazed with photomania. Hundreds set out into the high-summer streets, descending on the optician shops for the makings of Louis’s mercury dream. Within a week of this event, the country and the world knew him by name. Within three months, Louis’s pamphlet went through twenty-five editions and five languages. Within a year, his process was being used on five continents, in service of almost every field of human endeavor—to yield photogenic drawings of fossils, for phrenology portraits of captured Congo slaves, to study the geological strata of the American West, to catalog the medical pathology of the harelipped and the goitered and the leprosied, to chronicle eclipses and astronomical events, to render portraiture of politicians and kings and heads of state. In America the luminaries paid their respects: Samuel B. Morse at the annual supper of the National Academy of Design said the daguerreotypes could not be called copies of Nature, but portions of Nature herself and that the name Louis Daguerre will stand beside Columbus and Galileo. Edgar Allan Poe called the daguerreotypes miraculous beauties and photogenic drawings of absolute truth, and a few years later, Walt Whitman, then-editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, said the new art form possessed great magnetism and captured the soul of the human face. If Louis’s portraits captured the mezzotint of reality, then these articles and kind words, unfurled across the newspapers and journals, were telegrams of his passage to fame. He had arrived.