The Same Source

The man who pointed upward

John William Draper was a physician, a chemist, a philosopher, and a historian. He became the first president of the American Chemical Society and co-founded what is now the NYU School of Medicine. Photography was one instrument among many in a career built on the systematic investigation of natural phenomena.

In the winter of 1839 to 1840, Draper turned that instrument toward the sky. He had read about the daguerreotype process and recognised immediately what it might mean for science. If a light-sensitive surface could hold the image of a street, or a face, could it resolve the surface detail of a celestial body? Could it produce a record that no hand-drawn chart had ever achieved?

From the rooftop observatory of the University of the City of New York on Washington Square, he pointed his camera at the moon.

The 45-minute exposure

The instrument Draper used was a camera constructed from a cigar box, fitted with two lenses, using a silver-plated copper sheet sensitised with iodine vapour. On 23 March 1840, he reported his first attempt to the New York Lyceum of Natural History: a waning gibbous moon which he described as deficient in sharpness, though the position of the darker spots on the surface was distinct.

Three nights later, on 26 March 1840, he made the exposure that survived. A 45-minute commitment to a single frame, during which he manually tracked the moon’s movement to prevent blur. The last-quarter moon in its clear phase, with visible surface detail. The image approximately an inch in diameter on the original plate.

He had demonstrated that photography could resolve what the eye and the hand-drawn chart had only approximated. The camera could see the moon.

Three versions of the same image

After Draper’s death, the daguerreotype disappeared. For decades it lay stored in a little-used room in the attic of Gould Memorial Library at NYU’s University Heights campus. It was found in 1961. On 18 January 1962, the NYU Photo Bureau made a copy photograph of the recovered original. That copy became the source from which everything else descended.

In 2021, Dan Streible, a professor at NYU, published a detailed account of what had happened to that image since its recovery. His article, published in the Orphan Film Symposium, traces the daguerreotype from Draper’s rooftop through the archive and into the internet. Streible writes:

“This detailed daguerreotype became the source from which many copies derived. By 2021, so many digital copies of this 1840 image populate the Internet, subject to so many manipulations of photographic variables, that it may be difficult to discern that each derives from the same source.”

Zero Baseline presents three versions. The first is the original damaged daguerreotype as recovered in 1961, worn at the edges, carrying the physical marks of its own history. The second is the Smithsonian restoration (catalogue number 319,990), stabilised and clarified, the moon in its last-quarter phase, clear and scientific. The third is the version held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which Streible examines directly:

“Does the Met more accurately replicate Draper’s very first daguerreotype, with a mirror-reversed image? Does it imitate how the physical print was displayed in the museum? Or is it simply upside down?”

Three versions. All legitimate. All derived from the same physical object. Each telling a slightly different story.

Why this is a Point Zero

The Zero Baseline entry for Draper’s 1840 daguerreotype marks a Point Zero in the history of astrophotography: the earliest surviving photograph of a celestial body, made under documented conditions on a verified date, by a scientist who understood precisely what he was attempting to prove.

The verification parameters hold clearly. The image is authentic, photographic in technique, historically and scientifically significant, and genuinely inaugural. From this Point Zero the line runs forward to systematic celestial imaging, to the observatory programmes that would map the night sky through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to every domain of science that depends on photography’s ability to resolve what the naked eye cannot.

But this entry is distinct from others in the collection in one respect. It does not ask you to consider only one image. It asks you to consider what happens to an original when copies multiply and provenance is not tracked. The line from Draper’s 45-minute exposure to the images currently circulating online is a chain of succession, each version derived from the one before it. The physical original has not moved. Its digital descendants have gone everywhere.

The same source

When I first encountered this discrepancy, the question it raised was not primarily about Draper. It was about the conditions under which we trust an image. If the original is verified but the copies are not documented, at what point does the chain of evidence become unreliable?

That question became the founding concern of Zero Baseline. Not as an abstract problem in archival theory, but as a concrete one: visible in three side-by-side versions of a single 1840 daguerreotype, each presenting the moon slightly differently, each derived from the same source, none of them recording precisely how or when each version diverged from the physical original.

What would it mean to establish a verified digital original for the foundational images of photography’s history? Not a reproduction of the original, but a certified primary source, documented from the moment of first digitisation and verified by archival record. For most of the accepted images in photography’s history, nobody has tracked where the digital chain begins. The physical original exists. The first digital file derived from it is rarely held to the same standard of evidence.

This image is the reason I began building this platform. Not just because it is the earliest surviving photograph of the moon. But because it showed me, in the most concrete terms available, what happens when an original is recovered and the copies that follow it are not held to the same standard.

RESOURCES:

View John William Draper in the collection

Dan Streible. “Earth’s Moon (1840).” Orphan Film Symposium

Explore the collection chronologically

Image creditsLeft: John William Draper, Daguerreotype of the Moon, 26 March 1840. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Centre: New York University Archives, restored daguerreotype (Smithsonian, cat. no. 319,990), via Orphan Film Symposium. Right: John William Draper, Moon, Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, via Orphan Film Symposium.

Article reference:Dan Streible, Earth’s Moon (1840), Orphan Film Symposium, 21 February 2021.

© 2026 Patricia von Ah — Zero Baseline of Photography, SEETHINK Lab. All rights reserved.