William Henry Fox Talbot was born in 1800 in Dorset, England. He inherited Lacock Abbey, located some 160 kilometers west of London, when he was only five months old, and lived there his entire life. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won the Porson university prize in Greek verse and was Wrangler (a first-class honors student) in mathematics. Upon hearing of the invention of the daguerreotype in January 1839, he detailed his own photographic process before the Royal Society, displaying photographs he had taken using this technique, which he had invented in August 1835. He developed this process further and patented it as the calotype in 1841. Talbot began selling the world’s first photographic publication, The Pencil of Nature, in 1844, and over the next two years went on to add five more volumes to this work. He died in 1877.