The daguerreotype resulted from years of experimentation undertaken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. The first publicly announced photographic process, it was demonstrated to the Paris Academy of Sciences in January 1839. As this image of daguerreotypist John J. Fitzgibbon (1816?-1882) shows, the process was a complicated one in which a silver-coated copper plate was sensitized with iodine vapor, exposed in the camera, and then developed in mercury vapor. The result was a grainless image of exquisite detail.