Every snapshot has a history, but we’re not talking about the story where a three-year-old decides to face-plant into his birthday cake at grandma’s house. Instead, this history involves the process of the flash and the chemicals that imprinted that memory onto photographic paper.

According to the story, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre was experimenting with photographic plates of metal when he made one of his most important discoveries, purely by accident. The biggest problem with photography at the time was getting the images to stay without darkening into an indecipherable blob. Daguerre left an underexposed photographic plate in a cupboard and was surprised to discover an image fixed onto the plate a few days later. Needless to say he cleaned out that cupboard and by trial and error he found that a broken mercury thermometer had produced a vapor that developed a latent image. The discovery of the latent image was an enormous breakthrough in photographic science because it allowed for the exposure time of an image to shrink from eight hours to 30 minutes. Daguerre, delighted with his success, submitted the design to the French government and in 1839 the daguerreotype was exposed to the world.

Clearly, mercury and metal plates are no longer employed in modern snapshots, but that does not mean serendipity is lost from the science of photography. Ten years ago Harvard professor Eric Mazur discovered that blasting a silicon wafer with laser energy in the presence of sulfur and other chemicals produces a material, now named black silicon, which is more efficient in absorbing photons and releasing electrons. The patent on this technology was purchased by SiOnyx in 2006. The company will research the semi-conductive properties of black silicon and utilize it in the production of extraordinary and efficient visual equipment.