On this day in 1839, an American chemistry professor named John
William Draper took a photograph of the moon with a camera made
out of a cigar box. He used a process like Daguerre's, but he came up
with it by himself; Daguerre hadn't made his invention public yet. The
plate was exposed for twenty minutes, and the image was one inch
across. It was the first time anyone in the U.S. tried to take a
picture of
something in the sky.
>From the Writer's Almanac, http://almanac.mpr.org
