Capturing the Light starts with a tiny scrap of purple-tinged paper, 176 years old and about the size of a postage stamp. On it you can just make out a tiny, ghostly image of a gothic window, an image so small and perfect that it 'might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist': the world's first photographic negative. This captivating book traces the lives of two very different men in the 1830s, both racing to be the first to solve one of the world's oldest problems: how to capture an image and keep it for ever. On the one hand there is Henry Fox Talbot: a quiet, solitary gentleman-amateur tinkering away on his farm in the English countryside. On the other Louis Daguerre, a flamboyant, charismatic French showman in search of fame and fortune. Only one question remains: who will get there first?

Section - i: List of Illustrations Section - ii: Prologue: My First Daguerreotype Chapter - 1: The Locked Treasure Room Chapter - 2: Shadowgrams Chapter - 3: The Box of Wonders Chapter - 4: An Inheritance Chapter - 5: The Panorama Chapter - 6: An Innate Love of Knowledge Chapter - 7: More Beautiful than Nature Chapter - 8: Lacock Abbey Chapter - 9: Seeking the Impossible Chapter - 10: The Heliograph Chapter - 11: The Melancholy Artist Chapter - 12: Fixing the Image Chapter - 13: The Latticed Window, August 1835 Chapter - 14: The Magic Cabinet Chapter - 15: The Most Wonderful Discovery Ever Made Chapter - 16: From Today, Painting is Dead Chapter - 17: Photogenic Drawing Chapter - 18: The Académie des Sciences, August 1839 Chapter - 19: Daguerreotypomania Chapter - 20: Portraiture Chapter - 21: The Pencil of Nature Chapter - 22: The Monopoly of the Sunshine Chapter - 23: The Great Exhibition of 1851 Chapter - 24: The Reluctant Inventor Chapter - 25: Art or Science? Chapter - 26: The Mute Testimony of the Picture Chapter - 27: The Eye of History Section - iii: Epilogue: Everyman's Art Acknowledgements - iv: Acknowledgements Section - v: Notes Section - vi: Bibliography Index - vii: Index