Who is the earliest born person on photo. eg Was someone born in 1740 on an early photo in 1840?

Answer 1

Wow, I'm not sure if there's any way to know that! Unless the photo was a commissioned portrait, the photographer might not have even know the people who were in very early photos. Just like candids of today. And a lot of portraits have had their information lost to the ages. How many people working on their family history have found old pictures and not known anything about the person in the picture? Quite a few, I imagine.

I'll be impressed if anyone can come up with the answer to this question.

Answer 2

It should follow that whomever invented photography was probably also the person responsible for the first portrait. So who invented Photography? The first photograph is attributed to Joseph Niepce in 1824 (though he created other non-fixed negatives prior to this time). The exposure for the first fixed photograph titled,"points of view with the camera obscura" took about 5 days." As such it is probably not this process which is to yield the first portrait.
About 20 years later in 1839 Louise Daguerre announces to the world he has perfected the first practical photographic process which he called the Daguerreotype process. Prior to this announcement Daguerre has made several copper/silver plate photographs, one of which was a self portrait of the inventor himself Louis Daguerre in 1837. However, there is some dispute about this as the photographic process was simultaneous developed by several people at once, one of whom could have perhaps created the first portrait, but the oldest known portrait which has been discovered thus far is that of Daguerre. However, if the question that you ask is who was the first person ever captured on film, It may be as well be one of the lost photographic negatives of Niepce, though if it were, the person would probably not be recognizable, a ghostly figure at best, but we will never know because this images were never properly fixed, so they were destroyed. Please consider this article for reference. http://www.etudes.photographie.com/presse/1198-photcoll.html

Answer 3

There is a photo of Lemuel Cook, the last verifiable surviving veteran of the American Revolutionary War, born in 1759. The photo was taken in the early 1860s, so it should be possible (if maybe a little tricky) to do better.