Joseph Niépce was born on 7 March 1765 in Chalon-sur-Saône, Saône-et-Loire. He took what is believed to be the world’s first photogravure etching, in 1822, of an engraving of Pope Pius VII, but the original was later destroyed when he attempted to duplicate it. The earliest surviving photogravure etching by Niépce is of a 17th century engraving of a man with a horse and of an engraving of a woman with a spinning wheel. Niépce did not have a steady enough hand to trace the inverted images created by the camera obscura, as was popular in his day, so he looked for a way to capture an image permanently. He experimented with lithography, which led him in his attempt to take a photograph using a camera obscura. Niépce also experimented with silver chloride, which darkens when exposed to light, but eventually looked to bitumen, which he used in his first successful attempt at capturing nature photographically. He dissolved bitumen in lavender oil, a solvent often used in varnishes, and coated the sheet of pewter with this light capturing mixture. He placed the sheet inside a camera obscura to capture the picture, and eight hours later removed it and washed it with lavender oil to remove the unexposed bitumen.

He began experimenting to set optical images in 1793. Some of his early experiments made images, but they faded very fast. The earliest known, surviving example of a Niépce photograph (or any other photograph) was created in 1825. Niépce called his process heliography, which literally means "sun writing". Nevertheless, semiologist Roland Barthes, in a Spanish edition of his book "La chambre claire", "La cámara lúcida" (Paidós, Barcelona,1989) shows a picture from 1822, "Table ready", a foggy photo of a table set to be used for a meal.

Starting in 1829 he began collaborating on improved photographic processes with Louis Daguerre, and together they developed the physautotype, a process that used lavender oil. The partnership lasted until Niépce’s death in 1833. Daguerre continued with experimentation, eventually developing a process that little resembled that of Niépce. He named this the "Daguerreotype", after himself. He managed in 1839 to get the government of France to purchase his invention on behalf of the people of France. The French government agreed to award Daguerre a yearly stipend of 6,000 Francs for the rest of his life, and to give the estate of Niépce 4,000 Francs yearly. This arrangement rankled with Niépce's son, who claimed Daguerre was reaping all the benefits of his father's work. In some ways, he was right — for a good many years, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce received little credit for his significant contribution to the development of photography. Later historians have reclaimed Niépce from relative obscurity, and it is now generally recognized that his "heliographic" process was the first successful example of what we now call photography: an image created on a light-sensitive surface, by the action of light.

None of Niépce's inventions have been officially acknowledged; those accredited to him are:

Vélocipède

In 1818 he developed a very strong interest for this ancestor of the bicycle without pedals and transmission and cousin of the dandy horse from Karl von Drais. He built himself a model and called it the vélocipède. Nicephore made quite a sensation running his contraption on the local country roads but he could not resist improving it by different means: the adjustable saddle among them. This velocipede with the saddle is exhibited at the Niépce Museum. In a letter to his brother, Nicephore thought of motorizing his machine, thus imagining the moped.

Pyreolophore

This was the first internal combustion engine built, which was invented and patented by the Niépce brothers in 1807. This engine ran on controlled dust explosions of Lycopodium. Ten years later, they were the first in the world to make an engine work with a fuel injection system.

Marly Machine

It was in 1807 that the imperial government opened a competition to receive projects of hydraulic machines to replace the one that in Marly was used to deliver water to the Palace of Versailles from the Seine river. Built in 1684, the original machine located in Bougival, on the Seine river, was pumping up water on a one kilometer distance and an upslope of 150 meters. The Niépce brothers imagined a new principle for the machine and improved it once more in 1809. The machine had undergone a lot of changes in many of its parts. The mechanisms in the system were more elaborated: its pistons joined to the advantage of being more precise, another one that is to create far less resistance. They tested it many times, and the result was that with a drop of 4 feet 4 inches, it lifted to 11 feet the 7 /24 of the water it loses. But in December 1809 they got a message that they had waited too long and the Emperor had taken on himself the decision to ask the engineer Perier (1742 – 1818) to build a fire machine, also known as a steam engine, to operate the pumps at Marly.

The lunar crater Niepce is named after him.

As of 2008 Niépce's photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras, is on display in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The image was rediscovered in 1952 by historians Alison and Helmut Gernsheim.