Richard Beard and the Daguerreotype Patent in England

1 Portrait of Richard Beard (1801-1885) Richard Beard opened England's first photographic portrait studio in London on 23rd March 1841 and made a fortune selling daguerreotype licences.

Richard Beard, a successful coal merchant, and patent speculator, had seen the advantages of securing a monopoly in the production of daguerreotype portraits in England. In June 1840, Beard filed a patent which included the features of Alexander S Wolcott’s mirror camera which, by drastically reducing exposure times, would make the production of photographic portraits more effective. Beard then employed the services of John Frederick Goddard, a chemist and lecturer in science who had been experimenting with various chemicals to sensitize the silvered plates in an effort to accelerate camera exposure times. Early in 1841, Goddard produced a mixture of iodine and bromine to increase the sensitivity of the photographic plates, thereby reducing exposure times to less than a minute or, in bright sunlight, to a number of seconds. On 23rd March 1841, Richard Beard opened England’s first photographic portrait studio to the public at the Royal Polytechnic Institution, 309 Regent Street, London. In June 1841, Beard concluded his negotiations with Miles Berry, Louis Daguerre’s patent agent in England, and purchased the patent rights to the daguerreotype process. On 16th July 1841 Beard signed an agreement with Daguerre and the son of Nicephore Niepce, the man who had made the first successful photograph from nature in 1826.

By the end of July 1841, Beard had become the sole patentee of the daguerreotype process in “England, Wales and the town of Berwick on Tweed, and in all Her Majesty’s Colonies and Plantations abroad” and had a virtual monopoly in the production of photographic portraits using Daguerre’s method.

Beard’s only serious rival in the field of daguerreotype portraiture in 1841 was Antoine Claudet, a French glass merchant living in London,who had made direct contact with Daguerre in France and had secured from the inventor a licence to make daguerreotype portraits in London.

Until the patent rights of British Patent No 8194 expired on 14th August 1853, any person who wanted to legally carry out the art of daguerreotype portrait photography on a commercial basis had to apply to Richard Beard, to either purchase the right of patent in a prescribed geographical area or to purchase a licence to work the process in a particular town or city.

 

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Website last updated: 23 December, 2002

This website is dedicated to the memory of Arthur T. Gill (1915-1987), Sussex Photohistorian