ABSTRACT
For years, various authors would refer to Florence’s discovery of photography. This chapter presents some of those texts in order to provide a better understanding about the extent of the authors’ knowledge with regard to Florence’s experiments, as well as to what they concealed and disclosed about them to their contemporaries. The entry FLORENCE, Hercule, in the Encyclopedia e Diccionario Internacional, provides a reference to the inventor in the following terms: “It is owed to him the discovery of polygraphy and photography, since the ones by Niépce, Daguerre, Fox Talbot and Paitevin [Poitevin] are from 1833, 1834 and 1850. On June 26th, 1948, Arnaldo Machado Florence—the inventor’s great-grandchild, who, for some time, publicized his ancestor’s work—gave a lecture at the Sao Paulo Municipal Library about Florence’s life and work, in which he disclosed the inventor’s pioneering discoveries in the field of photography. Baier judged it correctly when he states that “without knowledge of the manuscripts, the matter cannot be decided.”.
