Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor and photographer who is credited for creating the world's first permanent photographic image. For the majority of his career, he worked as part of the Niépce brothers along with his elder brother Claude, working primarily on the world's first internal combustion engine, the Pyréolophore, before shifting focus to photography. Interestingly, while he is now regarded as one of the pioneers in the field of photography, he had received little credit for his accomplishments during his lifetime. It was about two decades after his death that his procedure of using bitumen as a slow and cost effective way to create photoresist for printing plates became widely accepted. Following his death, much of the limelight was absorbed by his former partner, Louis Daguerre, who had created his own photographic process called 'daguerréotype', based on Niépce's original idea. Thankfully, later historians were able to trace back to his contributions with his 'heliography', and subsequently revived him from obscurity.
