title: 1. Introduction
abstract: 1 The brothers entered the lucrative business through their father, Trupert Schneider (1804-1899), originally a cabinetmaker in Ehrenstetten near Freiburg in the Grand Duchy of Baden.He had learned the photographic technique developed by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) at the end of the 1840s, about ten years after its first public presentation in Paris, following a chance encounter with the daguerreotypist Joseph Broglie.