He fixed pictures with sunlight in a town that had no printing press — and wrote the word photographie six years before Paris.
On 15 January 1833, in a small town in the interior of São Paulo province, a French draughtsman opened his notebook and set down the thought that silver nitrate was "the only substance about which I know the virtue of darkening in the sun." Five days later he aimed what he himself called a "very imperfect" camera obscura at the world, and the world came back to him on a sheet of sensitized paper. Over the next months he worked out how to stop the image from darkening away — soaking his prints, in the end, in his own urine. He had invented photography. He had no idea that anyone else was trying.
Hercule Florence was two oceans and a continent from the nearest scientific society, in a town with no press to print a claim and no journal to receive one. So he named the thing himself: in a document dated 22 October 1833 he called it photographie. Six years later the news came upriver that a Frenchman named Daguerre had astonished Paris. Florence read it, he wrote, as "a jolt in my mind and my blood" — and then, with remarkable grace, conceded the century to a man who had never heard of him.
Nice · the Amazon · Campinas
The lifeline
1804
Born in Nice, son of an army surgeon; a childhood spent in Monaco
1824
Lands at Rio de Janeiro, aged twenty, off the French frigate Marie Thérèse
1826
Sets out from Porto Feliz as expedition draughtsman — 40 people, 7 boats, down the Tietê
1833
Fixes images by the action of light, and names the art photographie
1839
Reads of the daguerreotype; answers in a São Paulo paper, and is not believed
1879
Dies in Campinas on 27 March, absent from photography's history
By the numbers
The measure of him
1833
The year he fixed images by sunlight — working alone, in the Brazilian interior
4 hrs
Exposure his first camera-obscura negatives demanded; none of them survived the daylight
6 yrs
How far he preceded Arago's announcement of the daguerreotype — and Herschel's English word
1976
The year a laboratory in Rochester mixed his recipe again — and it worked
Notebooks, presses and light
The work
1825–29
The Langsdorff drawings. As second draughtsman on a four-year river expedition, he recorded the fauna, flora, landscapes and peoples of six present-day Brazilian states — reaching Cuiabá in January 1827 and Santarém, on the Amazon, in July 1828.
1829
Zoophonie. A notation system for animal voices — an attempt to write down sound decades before anyone could record it. Of the araponga he noted that "it makes a sound that imitates well the banging of a hammer on an anvil."
1830
Polygraphie. A printing process devised for a town that had no printer. He went on to establish the first printing shop in Campinas.
20 Jan 1833
The first two experiments — a "very imperfect" camera obscura and paper washed in silver nitrate, confirming what he had reasoned out five days earlier.
8 Apr 1833
Fixing. He records treating an exposed sheet with urine to arrest the darkening — the problem that defeated every earlier experimenter. He later sensitized paper with gold chloride, a step with no known precedent.
22 Oct 1833
The word. In a dated document he calls the process photographie, and explains why the name fits. Six years later, John Herschel arrives independently at the English "photography."
Unheard, then verified
Recognition
In his lifetime
No academy, society or journal within reach of Campinas to register a claim
His 1839 notice in the São Paulo paper A Phenix — stating he had worked nine years on fixing the camera obscura's image — changed nothing
His early negatives darkened away; only contact prints survive
The expedition's drawings vanished into an academy archive in St Petersburg for over a century
He died in 1879 unrecorded in any history of photography
Today
Boris Kossoy reconstructed his process from the notebooks between 1972 and 1976
Mid-1976: laboratories at the Rochester Institute of Technology reproduced it successfully
October 1976: the findings were presented at George Eastman House in Rochester
Epreuve Nº 2 (photographie), 1833 — held by the Instituto Moreira Salles, the oldest surviving photographic record in the Americas
The Instituto Hercule Florence in Campinas now keeps the archive he left behind
The place that made him
Campinas
He settled in 1830 in a small town of the São Paulo interior — later renamed Campinas — and never left it. It was the worst possible address for an inventor and the best possible one for this invention: a place so far from the argument over who was first that he simply got on with the work. He married twice, fathered twenty children, built the town its first press, and kept notebooks nobody read for a hundred and forty years.
1830
The year he settled there, and married Maria Angélica
1st
The town's first printing shop was the one he built himself
1863
The Florence School, founded with his second wife, Carolina Krug
"I did it before Daguerre's process, but I worked in exile… I had already given it that name; however, all honours to Daguerre."
— Hercule Florence, in his diary
