These photographs of fruit fly wings seen through a microscope
accompanied a journal article that boasted of the value of photographs as
“purely controlled,” without the errors and influences found in hand-drawn
illustrations. From the very outset, photography was heralded as a tool as
valuable for scientists as it was for artists. Louis Daguerre was reported in
January 1839 to have used a solar microscope to make a daguerreotype of a
spider “finished with such detail . . . that you may study its anatomy . . . as
if it were nature itself,” every fiber and nerve perfectly visible.