The textbook explains that photography was “developed in the 19th century through the artistic aspirations of two Frenchmen, Nicéphore Niépce and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre.”

• Joseph Nicéphore Niépce secured the world's earliest surviving photograph around 1826–1827 on a plate sensitised with bitumen, exposed for eight hours (this photograph is preserved at the University of Texas at Austin)
• From 1829 until Niépce's death in 1833, the two worked in partnership
• Louis Daguerre then developed the daguerreotype in 1837 — a process using copper plates lightly coated with sensitised silver and “developed” over mercury fumes, producing sharp, permanent images

The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process. Note: Henry Fox Talbot (Britain) independently developed the calotype process around the same time; George Eastman introduced roll film in 1888; Muybridge's 1877 experiments with sequential photographs of horses contributed to the development of cinema, not still photography.