IN 1844, William Henry Fox Talbot wrote of the epiphanic moment that led him to discover photography. It was Lake Como in 1833, and his aristocratic friends were sketching merrily with the aid of a camera obscura. Talbot felt held back by his lack of draughtsmanship; “How charming it would be”, he thought, “if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably and remain fixed upon the paper!” This notion sparked decades of photographic development, as a new exhibition at the Science Museum Media Space—“Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph”—thoughtfully explores. Talbot’s light-hearted and romantic anecdote was also a calculated strategic move. He had been chastened in 1839 into quickly publicising his discovery of the negative-positive process after Louis Daguerre had unveiled his own rival photographic method in France (the modestly-named “Daguerreotype”). By describing this moment at Lake Como, Talbot was staking a public claim that his own invention had preceded Daguerre’s announcement.

In reality, there was no single person who first “discovered photography” in the 19th century. Along with Talbot and Daguerre, there were numerous other aristocratic amateurs and entrepreneurs experimenting with similar processes at the same time. But when it came to money and fame, the alchemy of public relations proved almost as important as that of chemicals and optics.

Daguerre was a much cannier commercial operator than Talbot. Clever promotion by Daguerre and his circle meant that his invention whipped up febrile excitement in France and elsewhere; in 1839, a satirical print was made of the “Daguerreotypomanie” (“Daguerrotypomania”) that swept the country, showing people taking daguerreotypes from balloons, dancing in prostrate ecstasy around giant cameras, and forming rowdy queues that stretch beyond the horizon for the chance to get their photo taken. Daguerre soon gifted his process to the French nation, making the patent public. In return, he got a generous sum of money and a state pension for life.

Talbot’s relationship with commercial success was much more fraught. The British government was not interested in rewarding him like the French had Daguerre, and the latter’s invention already had a vicelike grip on the new market. There was, however, one crucial difference between their processes that seemed to give Talbot an edge—the Daguerreotype produced a single unique image, like a Polaroid, but with Talbot’s “negative-positive” method unlimited copies could be made from one original. This concept later became the cornerstone of modern photography, and made it a medium uniquely suited to publishing and mass distribution.

But at the time the negative-positive process was neither reliable nor cheap enough to capitalise on this difference. The main problem that dogged Talbot’s “calotypes”, as he later called them (after a brief flirtation with a similarly-modest “talbotype”), was fading. His flagship publication, “The Pencil of Nature”, suffered dearly from this, with early buyers reporting that their photographs had deteriorated not long after purchase. Collaboration with “The Art-Union” magazine in 1846 saw an unprecedented 7,000 calotype prints distributed as inserts, only for almost every one of them to deteriorate in quality—some turned completely blank.

All this was deeply damaging to the reputation of Talbot’s process, especially as the comparative longevity of Daguerre’s images became obvious. Punch even joined the fray, publishing doggerel in 1847 that crowed:

“Behold thy portrait! – day by day,

I’ve seen its features die;

First the moustachios go away,

Then off the whiskers fly.”

In the face of flagging sales, “The Pencil of Nature” was eventually halted after just six of its 12 planned instalments.

By the middle of the century, it seemed as though Daguerre had won—daguerreotypes were a lucrative business and could be found across the globe. By contrast, the calotype was tied to a string of mostly unsuccessful commercial ventures, many fronted by Talbot’s valet Nicolaas Henneman. Yet by 1860 the daguerreotype would be all but displaced by improved versions of Talbot’s ideas; F. Scott Archer’s wet-collodion process built on Talbot’s concept to become the main means of producing photographic negatives, before itself being superseded in the 1880s by Dr R.L. Maddox's Gelatin Dry Plate process. This made the creation of a negative even easier—incredibly, Maddox's Gelatin Dry Plates remained in production up until the mid-1970s. Photography using a reproducible negative, as Talbot had pioneered, soon became reliable and cheap thanks to these later innovators, underpinning the explosion of photographic culture right up until the start of the digital era.

Alongside his technical influence, Talbot’s personal legacy today is undoubtedly the beautiful photographs he produced. Many have now been brought together for the first time in this long overdue collection of his work. The experimental monochrome prints of fabrics have a strikingly contemporary feel, while his obsessive interest in the ability of photography to render an unprecedented “completeness of detail” led to strangely beguiling studies of elaborate early-Victorian china, enormous shaggy haystacks and the sunlit facades of pockmarked Oxford colleges. These dreamy, and at times haunting, images show that his historical importance should never be allowed to eclipse his skill as a photographer.

"Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph" will be showing at the Science Museum in London until September 11th 2016.