A Beauty in Mourning The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process, invented around 1837 by Louis-Jacques-Mand Daguerre. The physical daguerreotype itself is a direct positive made in the camera on a silvered copper plate. The raw material for plates was called Sheffield plate, plating by fusion or cold-rolled cladding and was a standard hardware item produced by heating and rolling silver foil in contact with a copper
