Nicéphore Niépce was born in Chalon-sur-Saône, Saône-et-Loire, where his father was a wealthy lawyer; this had caused the whole family to flee the French Revolution.
His elder brother Claude (1763–1828) was also his collaborator in research and invention.
He also had a sister and a younger brother called Bernard.Baptised Joseph, he had adopted the name Nicéphore, in honor of Saint Nicephorus, the ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople.
While studying at the Oratorian college in Angers, he had learned science and the experimental method, rapidly achieving success and graduating to work as a professor of the college.Niépce had served as a staff officer in the French army under Napoleon, spending a number of years in Italy and on the island of Sardinia, but ill-health had forced him to resign, whereupon he married Agnes Romero and became the Administrator of the district of Nice in post-revolutionary France.
In 1795, Niepce resigned as administrator of Nice to pursue scientific research with his brother Claude.
One source reports his resignation to have been forced due to his unpopularity.
In 1801, the brothers had returned to the family's estates in Chalon to continue their scientific research, and where they were united with their mother, their sister and their younger brother Bernard.
Here, they manage the family estate as independently wealthy gentlemen-farmers, raising beets and producing sugar.
The Niépce brothers had invented and patented the Pyréolophore, probably the world's first internal combustion engine to be built, in 1807.
This engine ran on controlled dust explosions of Lycopodium and was installed on a boat that ran on the river Saône.
(Ten years later, the brothers will be the first in the world to make an engine work with a fuel injection system.)
Coincidentally, in 1807 François Isaac de Rivaz also constructs an engine powered by internal combustion .
In 1807, the imperial government had opened a competition to receive projects of hydraulic machines to replace the original Marly Machine (located in Marly-le-Roi) that delivered water to the Palace of Versailles from the Seine river.
The machine had been built in Bougival in 1684, from where it pumped water a distance of one kilometer and raised it 150 meters.
The Niépce brothers, having conceived a new principle for the machine, improve it once more in 1809.
The machine has undergone a lot of changes in many of its parts.
The mechanisms in the system are more elaborated: its pistons joined to the advantage of being more precise; another, that is to create far less resistance.
They have tested it many times, but in December 1809 they receive a message that they had waited too long and the Emperor has taken upon 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.