On a Spring day in 1839, American artist and telegraph
inventor Samuel Morse and scenic artist Louis Daguerre
— whose daguerreotype ushered in the new world of
photography — meet for the first time at Daguerre’s
studio in Paris. While demonstrating their inventions to
one another, they notice a silhouetted figure getting a
shoeshine in one of Daguerre’s pictures and devise a
remarkable scheme to identify the individual, the first
human ever depicted in a photographic image.
