William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot was a British scientist and inventor who developed the calotype, also called the talbotype, one of the earliest photographic processes, announced in 1839 in close public competition with Louis Daguerre's rival daguerreotype process in France. Unlike the daguerreotype, which produced a single unique image, Talbot's calotype process created a translucent paper negative from which multiple positive prints could be made, establishing the negative-positive principle that underlay most photographic and, later, motion-picture film technology for well over a century. Talbot published The Pencil of Nature in the mid-1840s, widely regarded as the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs.