Nicéphore Niépce

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (7 March 1765 to 5 July 1833) was a French inventor and one of the pioneers of photography, born in Chalon-sur-Saône where his father was a wealthy lawyer. He developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving products of a photographic process, and in the mid-1820s he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among his other inventions was the Pyréolophore, one of the world's first internal combustion engines, which he conceived, created and developed with his older brother Claude Niépce. He served as a staff officer in the army of Napoleon and later as administrator of the district of Nice, resigning in 1795 to pursue science.