Wet plate Collodion is an early photographic process, invented by Frederic Scott Archer. It was introduced in the 1850s and by the end of that decade it had almost entirely replaced the first practical photographic process, the  daguerreotype. During the 1880s the collodion process, in turn, was largely replaced by gelatin dry plates glass plates with a photographic emulsion Collodion process  is usually taken to be synonymous with the "collodion wet plate process", a very inconvenient form which required the photographic material to be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes, necessitating a portable darkroom for use in the field.