Earlier writing but maybe still relevant Abbott Payson Usher. A History of Mechanical Inventions, pages 65–68. Harvard University Press, 1929, pointed out that pointed out that it was futile to try to identify the inventor of mechanical printing, or the steam engine, or the airplane, since cultural achievement is a social accomplishment based on the accumulation of many small acts of insight by individuals. John Szarkowski [Photography Until Now, page 11. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989] quotes Usher in describing the long and complicated prehistory of photography. The invention of photography, sometimes simplistically credited to Daguerre in about 1840, as Szarkowski describes was really the result of the efforts of many people before and after Daguerre. Szarkowski says: "Inventions—the name by which we call devices that seem fundamentally new—are almost always born out of a process that is more like farming than magic. From a complex ecology of ideas and circumstances that includes the condition of the intellectual soil, the political climate, the state of technical competence, and the sophistication of the seed, the suggestion of new possibilities arises."