Daguerreotype

Technology has always been interesting, especially in its first generation. It holds the promise of something to come. Yet being first generation it becomes easy to see fragility, even in its core purpose or functionality. This photo is the perfect example.

Daguerreotype image of Paris courtesy of smarthistory

The only people on the street appear to be the shoe shine boy and his customer. But the 10 - 15 minute exposure time on this Daguerreotype image was so long that it wasn't possible to capture everyone else moving through the streets. So, a new technology for taking photos wasn't properly capable of taking photos.

Which begs a question: how many technologies do we have deployed which are behaving like the Daguerreotype? The extent to which novel technologies and ideas are being implemented at scale should worry us far more than it does.