The French amateur inventor Nicéphore Niépce is credited with creating the first permanent photograph in 1826 or 1827. It was a black-and-white image of the view outside his window: the courtyard of his country estate, Le Gras. However, the concept of photography—or at least the principle of projecting an image using light—was likely known in the ancient world. Perhaps the earliest written account of the phenomenon was by Chinese philosopher Mozi in the 5th century bce. He explained that when the light rays from an object that is illuminated by a light source pass through a pinhole into a dark room, they project an inverted image of the object onto the opposite wall. The projected image, however, was also dynamic, and one of the central reasons 19th-century inventors, including Niépce, experimented with photography was to make the projected image permanent. Niépce acknowledged that his photographic process, which he called heliography, needed improvement, and in subsequent decades inventors such as Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot, and the Lumière brothers built on each other’s experiments to improve the photographic process and produce vivid reproductions of the natural world.