Daguerre made photography practical, because of his invention of the Daguerreotype. The Daguerreotype required no knowledge of drawing and required little time to take and develop pictures.

    The process to make a picture using the Daguerreotype was to take a sheet of copper plotted with silver. After the surface was well cleaned and highly polished, it was exposed in a small box to iodine vapor until the surface turned a golden yellow. The sensitized surface was placed in the camera obscura for about five minutes and developed in a vapor derived from mercury. The plate was washed and dried, then placed in a case with a sheet of glass over the Daguerreotype to protect its surface, because the image was easily rubbed off the plate.

    Some problems of the Daguerreotype were that it was capable of making only one copy of an image, the image could only be seen from a certain position, and it was expensive.

    The Daguerreotype was the first commonly used photographic process. Improvements were made upon it and the exposure time decreased from 30 minutes to a few seconds making portraits feasible. Daguerre also discovered that an image could be made permanent by immersing it in salt.

    An announcement was made in Paris by the Academic de Sciences of the success of Daguerre. Other experimenters challenged Daguerre and claimed priority. The mutual reaction between these pioneers, each learning from one another, each striving to out do the other, produced at last a universal technique.

    Daguerre's invention of photography was not wholly welcomed, because some artists saw the invention of photography as a threat to their livelihood and prophesied that painting would cease to exist. Painters continued to paint and photographers proliferated; at best, everyone agreed that the new invention was useful.