William Henry Fox Talbot, the son of an army officer, received his master's degree from Cambridge University in 1825. In 1831, he was made a member of the British scientific society, the Royal Society, for his expertise in mathematics. He came to be quite well known for his studies in calculus and in the translation of ancient cuneiform tablets though his greatest fame would come from his work in photographic science.

In 1833 he entered Parliament, but retired the next year and began experimenting with photography. Unbeknownst to Talbot, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was performing similar experiments in photography at the same time in France. While using a camera lucida to capture natural images from the shores of Italy's Lake Como, Talbot realized that he lacked the drawing talent required to sketch the image on paper. Instead Talbot was inspired to find a means to record images without drawing. From 1834 to 1835, Talbot...