Pushkin.
It's October 5th, 1833, and inventor William Henry Fox Talbot is annoyed.
After months of delays,
Fox Talbot was finally able to take his new bride on their long-awaited honeymoon to the beautiful shores of Lake Como,
one of the prettiest vacation spots in Italy.
Think shimmering blue waters, statue-filled gardens,
Everyone from Lord Byron to George Clooney has vacationed there.
And that's why Fox Talbot was annoyed.
Because he didn't want to just see this lovely scene himself,
he wanted all his friends to see how pretty the lake was too.
The problem, of course, was that this was 1833, no smartphone cameras.
If Fox Talbot wanted to share this beautiful scene with his friends back home, he had to draw it.
Fox Talbot tried sketching the lakeside with the help of a camera lucida,
the 19th century equivalent of the best smartphone camera.
But his result wasn't all that great.
It was so bad, in fact, that he called it a melancholy to behold.
It was in this moment of vacation disappointment that Fox Talbot had some inspiration.
How charming it would be, he later wrote,
if these natural images could imprint themselves durably upon the paper.
Within just two years, Fox Talbot would invent an early way to do this.