The first photo-cameras:
Unimaginable modern technique
at that time

"Camera obscura" of Nièpce with installed equipments as first photo-camera
(box-camera) about 1825.
What looks like today from primitive times, was at that time high-tech.

Beside Daguerre, Nièpce was the co-founder of the modern photography, beside Fox Talbot in England, Hippolyte Bayard in Paris, Steinheil und Kobell in Munich and so on.

Nièpce reached important advance in combination of light-chemical knowledge which conducted to first solutions in 1826.

Would this be debated consequently between the leading scientists (opticians and chemists) of London, Paris, Munich and so on, one had have the photography still at the time of Goethe as practicable technique. This way the search was left to outsiders, amateurs and artists and needed unusually long time until the patent of Daguerre in 1839.

One can see in this process also that there was a vital interest of the painters in the solution of the question, which could has happened 25 years earlier looking only natural scientific. The invention, once pronounced, came as something expected for a long time and was followed immediately in many places.