Biography
7 March 1765 – 5 July 1833 · French · Known for: World's first photograph (1826)
French inventor and pioneer of photography who created the world's oldest surviving photograph using heliography. Also co-invented the Pyréolophore, one of the world's first internal combustion engines.
Niépce was born in Chalon-sur-Saône, Saône-et-Loire, where his father was a wealthy lawyer. His older brother Claude (1763–1828) was also his collaborator in research and invention, but died half-mad and destitute in England, having squandered the family wealth in pursuit of non-opportunities for the Pyréolophore. Niépce also had a sister and a younger brother, Bernard.
Niépce served as a staff officer in the French army led by Napoleon, spending years in Italy and on the island of Sardinia. Ill health eventually forced him to resign, whereupon he married Agnes Romero and became the Administrator of the district of Nice in post-revolutionary France.
In 1795 he resigned as administrator of Nice to pursue scientific research with his brother Claude. One source reports his resignation to have been forced due to his unpopularity.
In 1801 the brothers returned to the family's estates in Chalon to continue their scientific research, reuniting with their mother, sister, and younger brother Bernard. Here they managed the family estate as independently wealthy gentlemen-farmers, raising beets and producing sugar, while quietly pursuing their experiments with light and chemistry.
In 1827 Niépce journeyed to England to visit his seriously ill elder brother Claude, who was now living in Kew, near London. Claude had descended into delirium and squandered much of the family fortune chasing inappropriate business opportunities for the Pyréolophore.
Nicéphore Niépce died of a stroke on 5 July 1833, financially ruined. His grave in the cemetery of Saint-Loup de Varennes was financed by the municipality — the same village near the family house where he had experimented and made the world's oldest surviving photographic image.
His son Isidore (1805–1868) formed a partnership with Daguerre after his father's death and was granted a government pension in 1839 in return for disclosing the technical details of Nicéphore's heliogravure process.
A cousin, Claude Félix Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (1805–1870), was a chemist and the first to use albumen in photography. He also produced photographic engravings on steel, and during 1857–1861 discovered that uranium salts emit a form of radiation invisible to the human eye.
Photojournalist Janine Niépce (1921–2007) is a distant relative.
