The camera, as we recognize it today, was invented by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1816. He created the first device that could capture an image, with his earliest surviving photograph taken in 1826 or 1827. Niépce developed a process called heliography that used a camera obscura to produce permanent images on a pewter plate. Later, Louis Daguerre improved the technology and invented the daguerreotype camera in 1839, which produced detailed and commercially successful images. Johann Zahn, in 1685, is credited with designing the first portable camera concept, but it was Niépce who made the first photographic camera that captured permanent images.
