Daguerre to Be Different!

(Wired) - The daguerrotype process had a relatively short commercial life span of about two decades. A major reason was that innovators capitalized on "France's gift to the world" and started improving the process immediately. Better emulsions and better developing and fixing solutions improved image quality and reduced exposure times. Replacing the metal matrix for the emulsions with glass-plate negatives -- and eventually celluloid -- and printing the images on paper all helped shape more than a century of film photography.
But the sudden release of the previously secret process created a worldwide mania for having one's image "done." This was especially true in the United States, as you can see in the following examples. Continued