Starlight Detectives

by Alan Hirshfeld

  The wife of Richard Bond, William Bond’s youngest son, recalled her childhood impressions of the intimate working relationship between William and George, whom she watched one day drawing sunspots: “One observer, with a sharp pencil, traced the spots as they were reflected on the paper, while the other wrote down any notes or observations, of time, of peculiar appearances, or explanatory of the drawings. But both of them . . . had eye and hand and mind so thoroughly trained, that even to children it was fascinating to watch . . . their enthusiasm and delight in the work, and the quick response and recognition of either to a remark or suggestion of the other.”

  The public clamored to see the magnificent new refractor, which they were told could magnify celestial objects more than a thousand-fold. Most of the visitors attended the weekly viewing sessions, but a steady stream arrived unannounced at the observatory’s doorstep. One couple came all the way from Michigan after reading a newspaper account of the instrument. At first, the good-natured Bonds tolerated these periodic intrusions. The turning point came with the public viewing session on the evening of October 23, 1847. “They came by the Hundreds,” William Bond penciled in his diary, “so as to quite overwhelm us.” The facility was left strewn with debris, he complained, “something like those portions of the common in Boston, which have been the most crowded, on the morning after a fourth of July.” Thereafter, public access to the Observatory was restricted.

  The evening’s “perfect Babel,” as Bond aptly put it, was a fitting coda to a different sort of fiasco that occurred earlier that day. It began with the arrival at the observatory of a lanky, ruggedly handsome man with a fringe beard rounding his jaw. Bond would have recognized John Adams Whipple as the proprietor of a Boston storefront located not far from his own. Although more than twice his age, Bond would surely have felt a kinship with Whipple, who was, like him, a practical-minded mechanic with an eye to nature. Whipple had asked to use the big refractor for an open-ended project that would unwittingly lead to one of the most important advances in astronomy since the introduction of the telescope. Tucked under John Whipple’s arm was a wooden box with a leather bellows and glass lens: a camera.

  Chapter 3

  WRITING WITH LIGHT

  [Photography] seemed to epitomize new means of reaching truth in a form acceptable to everyone. . . . By providing new methods of insights, it seemed to be a manifestation of truth itself—with beauty.

  —Richard Rudisill, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society, 1971

  THE LOCALE WAS AT ONCE FAMILIAR, and unlike anything François Arago had ever seen before. There, on the southern flank of the Ile de la Cité, rose the towers and flying buttresses of Notre Dame cathedral. To either side arched the elegant stone bridges Arago had often crossed over the Seine—although today their arrangement was oddly reversed, with Pont de L’Archeveché on the left and Pont Saint-Louis on the right, instead of the other way around. The river itself had a curious unearthly sheen, its normally agitated surface smoothed into a silvery ribbon so still that it mirrored the bridge abutments. Remarkably, the entire scene was rendered in myriad shades of gold-tinted gray, as if nature’s pigments had been scrubbed away to reveal only the fine-lined sketch underneath. Yet, even to François Arago’s practiced eye, the colors of Paris were hardly missed amid the vibrant interplay between light and dark.

  Were he not a man of science—in fact, Director of the Paris Observatory and Permanent Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences—Arago might have sworn that he was witnessing a miracle. But the six-by-eight inch metal slab onto which this diminutive slice of Paris had seemingly been shrunk was the product of human invention. Its secretive creator, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, an acclaimed painter of theatrical sets, must have been pleased with Arago’s response to his picture. He had expended years of solitary labor on this endeavor and was ready, at last, to reap the profits. By the fall of 1838, Daguerre had shown his camera pictures—now numbering around forty—to a privileged few and revealed his photographic technique to no one. He hoped to sell usage rights to the new technology—the daguerreotype, he would call it—to well-heeled visitors at a public exhibition in Paris on January 15, 1839. An endorsement by such a distinguished and well-connected citizen as François Arago—a member of the Chamber of Deputies in the French Parliament—would be a promotional coup.

  Louis Daguerre’s photograph of Notre Dame and the Seine, 1838.

  Arago had requested the meeting with Daguerre, for only by direct inspection could he judge the reality of the rumored process that captured images without paint or brush, but solely by chemical means. If true, it would be a boon to art and to science. With a daguerreotype camera, a small band of workers could record the ancient stoneworks of Egypt, geological features across Europe, flora and fauna the world over, even aspects of luminous bodies in the heavens. Daguerre should be justly compensated for his invention, Arago believed, but the greater good of France—indeed of the world—must take primacy. Once validated, the daguerreotype process must not be patented. It must be freely available to anyone who sought to maximize its potential.

  No doubt Daguerre was appraising Arago and his motives, as Arago was surely doing of him. Daguerre offered Arago a magnifying glass and suggested that he take a closer look at the picture. Arago pored over Daguerre’s metal plate through the lens. The more he screwed up his eyes, the more he found himself drawn into the encyclopedic still life, whose every recess held a further surprise. Under magnification, every window mullion, every roof tile, every cobblestone was crisply delineated. Notre Dame’s varied surfaces became a tumble of tiny Euclidean forms, its spires needlelike slashes against the brilliant sky. Even the shadows underneath the bridges feathered into the gloom. The scene seemed almost too realistic to be real, possessing a fineness of detail that made a mockery of human vision.

  Scanning the Lilliputian streets and quays for the telltale forms of people, Arago encountered not a soul. Daguerre had created a barren architectural showcase that drew its peculiar power from the vitality of light playing on forms and materials, but was otherwise drained of any human presence. Arago intuited the reason: every creature or object that had moved during the long minutes of exposure had left no impression on the daguerreotype plate. The pedestrians, barge loaders, cart drivers, street vendors—all had smeared themselves into oblivion by dint of their workaday activity.

  Arago put down the magnifier. As to Daguerre’s picture, he could draw no other conclusion: regardless of how fine the brush, how keen the eye, how steady the hand, this was no trick of the painter’s palette. No artist who ever lived could have created such an excruciatingly accurate scene, so far it stood above human capability. Arago’s course was as clear as the wondrous image before him: he had to convince Louis Daguerre to divulge his secret method.

  In 1822, Louis Daguerre opened the Diorama, which soon became one of the most popular cultural attractions in Paris. The Diorama featured a central, revolving auditorium, around which were arrayed three skylit stages. Each stage was an illusionist’s playground, a wholly artificial reality conferred by outsize murals (up to seventy-two by forty-eight feet), trompe l’oeil paintings, forced perspective, artifacts, sounds, smells, and lighting effects. There were no actors; the visual sleights of hand were the attraction.

  Louis Daguerre.

  One of the more popular of Diorama presentations, on view for three years, was Midnight Mass at the Church of St.-Etienne-du-Mont, Paris, described by one visitor this way:

  As night fell the church gradually darkened, the devout came to take their places, and, to the peals of an organ and the fumes of incense, choir boys lit candles. The Mass was sung, the faithful disappeared, the candles were extinguished and daybreak illuminated the stained-glass windows. The illusion was so perfect that a lad from the country threw a coin onto the stage to find out whether there was space in front of him.

  To help establish the proper perspective for his theater sets and Diorama sce
nes, Daguerre employed a camera obscura, an optical device long used by artists to project images onto a surface for tracing. (Leonardo da Vinci sketched such a device in 1519, featuring a pinhole aperture for entry of light. Giovanni Battista della Porta recommended it as a drafting aid in his 1553 tract, Natural Magic. Fifteen years later, Daniello Barbaro, author of a treatise on perspective, replaced the pinhole with a lens.) Daguerre’s camera obscura consisted of a wooden box with a converging lens at one end, canted mirror inside, and ground glass screen on top, from which the projected image was traced onto paper. In the mid-1820s, Daguerre considered whether the image might instead be recorded directly onto a chemically treated plate. He found this to be a fertile area of research, with very old roots.

  In his De rebus metallicis from 1566, Georg Fabricius described a waxy, translucent alchemical product called horn-silver (silver chloride) that was later found to blacken in sunlight. In 1614, Italian chemist Angelo Sala discovered similar behavior in lapis lunearis, or powdered silver nitrate. In what might be considered photography’s pioneering experiment, German scientist Johann Heinrich Schulze, in 1727, covered bottles of silver nitrate crystals with paper stencils of handwritten words or sentences. He placed the bottles in a sunny spot, and found that crystals underneath the excised portions of the stencil—those blackened by the Sun—replicated his handwriting. Other silver salts, or halides, including silver iodide, silver chloride, and silver bromide, were likewise observed to be light-sensitive. (Chemical studies reveal that exposure to light liberates the combining element and leaves pure metallic silver. The silver particles form a latent image, which is amplified in the development process.)

  During the 1790s, Thomas Wedgewood, son of the famous English porcelain maker, created sunlight-generated silhouettes and contact prints of engravings on paper sensitized with silver nitrate. However, he found that images in a camera obscura were too faint to trigger any photochemical response. A similar abortive attempt was made in 1812 by Samuel Morse, the American painter and inventor of the telegraph, while he was a student at Yale University. Had either succeeded, they would have been confronted by a practical issue: how to “turn off” the photochemical reaction once the exposure is finished. Without such intervention, the entire photosensitive plate inevitably darkens over time, obliterating any picture. As François Arago complained about the inability to fix a photographic image, “What then was there so wonderful, in images of which scarcely a glance could be obtained, and this only by the light of a small lamp, for they disappeared as soon as it was attempted to bring them to day light?”

  Incontestable success was achieved by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a French lithographer and inventor. In 1826, after more than a decade of experimentation, Niépce took the earliest known permanent photograph from nature. This heliograph, as he called it, was the product of an eight-hour exposure from the third-floor window of his house at Le Gras near Chalon-sur-Saône. The camera plate was an eleven-by-ten inch pewter slab that had been varnished with a suspension of powdered bitumen in lavender oil. Bitumen, an asphalt derivative of petroleum, hardens—it turns insoluble—when exposed to light, a property that drew Niépce’s attention. Although bitumen is black in its native form, its derivative varnish turns grayish-white as it dries on the plate.

  Upon exposure, the camera image maps itself onto the bitumen-covered plate, creating areas of different hardness, depending on the incident illumination. A latent image results, invisible to the eye. To develop the plate, Niépce applied a solvent of lavender oil and turpentine. The solvent strips away nonhardened and partially hardened areas of bitumen—those that had received lesser illumination—revealing the grayish pewter underneath. By contrast, hardened areas—those that had received the most light—are impervious to the action of the solvent. Thus, the recorded picture consists of brighter tones, rendered in remnant bitumen, against somewhat darker tones of pewter. The fully developed heliograph is a dim, grainy, yet recognizable, reproduction of the actual scene from the window.

  While visiting his brother in London in 1827, Niépce tried to enlist the financial support of the Royal Society for his process. He was turned down when he refused to divulge how the pictures were made. (Before returning to France, Niépce left the heliographs with botanist Francis Bauer, who continued to press Niépce’s case. Upon Bauer’s death, View from the Window at Le Gras passed through a variety of private hands and was considered lost, until discovered in a family trunk in 1952. Photograph collector Helmut Gernsheim donated the picture to the University of Texas at Austin, where it is now on permanent display.)

  Niépce was dissatisfied with the narrow tonal range of his heliographs; there was no pure black or pure white, only shades of gray. Having read that silver darkens in the presence of iodine, he replaced his pewter plates with silver-coated copper plates. He took the exposure and developed the plate as before, but then fumed the developed bitumen image in iodine vapor, blackening areas of silver that had been laid bare by the solvent. Finally, he dissolved any remnant of hardened bitumen, revealing the untouched silver below. Now the bright areas of the image were rendered in brilliant silver-white and the dark areas of the image in iodine-blackened silver. The resultant images were a marked improvement over his initial trial. Still, the hours-long exposure times for the bitumen plates were impractically long.

  Having learned of Niépce’s work through a common acquaintance, Daguerre posted a letter in January 1826 expressing his interest in the subject and suggesting that he and Niépce collaborate. Niépce did not reply, informing his son Isadore that “one of these Parisians wants to pump me for information.” A second and third letter followed a year later. (Daguerre’s letters were lost when Niépce dropped his pocketbook down a toilet in a London hotel.) After confirming Daguerre’s bona fides, Niépce agreed to a series of meetings in Paris. At the time, Niépce had accumulated more than a decade of imaging experience, while Daguerre had spent at most three years working with silver chloride paper and dabbling in color imaging. Nevertheless, Niépce was taken with Daguerre’s boisterous sincerity, not to mention his entrepreneurial spirit—“there should be found some way of getting a large profit out of it”—for the two men signed a ten-year business partnership on December 4, 1829.

  Niépce’s death in 1833 left Daguerre to advance the project on his own. This he did to resounding effect. Daguerre dispensed altogether with Niépce’s bitumen substrate, realizing that images could be produced directly through the reaction of silver with iodine vapor. Equally significant, he discovered that exposure to mercury vapor renders the latent silver iodide image visible. (The source of this particular insight is unknown.) And in 1837, Daguerre introduced the all-important means to render his images semipermanent. To deflect any accusations of opportunism, Daguerre later published Niépce’s own account of his research, written December 5, 1829. The record is clear that Daguerre’s subsequent contributions to the development of the process were significant and that his name is rightly applied to it.

  By autumn 1838, having managed some forty successful exposures, Daguerre was ready to market his invention. (The earliest of these photographs, a still life taken in his studio, dates to 1837.) “By this process,” Daguerre trumpets in a never-released broadside, “without any notion of drawing, without any knowledge of chemistry or physics, it will be possible to take in a few minutes the most detailed views, and the most picturesque sites, for the technical means are simple, and require no special knowledge to be used. Only care and a little practice is needed to succeed perfectly.” Daguerre goes on to suggest that everyone will take a picture of their chateau or country house, and that both science and art will reap the benefits of precise, objective imaging. But he admits that, as yet, human portraiture is not possible because of the sitter’s inevitable movements during the half-hour exposures. Daguerre’s business proposal was straightforward: one thousand francs bought rights to commercial use of the daguerreotype; two hundred thousand francs purchased the process outright
.

  Despite all efforts, Daguerre found not a single buyer for the daguerreotype process. Ironically, no one could see the big picture—neither the technology’s revolutionary nature nor its monetary prospects. Illustrators and painters were integral to the history and social fabric of France. Why take a proven means of artistic reproduction and fob it off to a chemical process? The notion that the technology itself might spur undreamed-of applications lay beyond the perception of the ordinary businessman.

  To the chastened Daguerre, François Arago must have seemed a savior. This man, now poring over samples of Daguerre’s unique craft, was by every indication a visionary: astronomer, physicist, writer, lecturer. Who better than Arago to appreciate the value of the daguerreotype? And, with his access to the highest rungs of government, who better to loosen the treasury’s purse strings? On Arago’s word hinged Daguerre’s recompense for all the years of solitary toil, if only he could see the pictures properly in the light of the future.

  Arago was indeed impressed by the daguerreotype, which surpassed his every expectation. He grasped its cultural and scientific promise for the nation. Technology of this magnitude, he concluded, was too valuable to be left in the self-interested hands of one man or a cadre of wealthy investors. Let everyone have free access to Daguerre’s work; let no restrictive patent hinder its rapid, full flowering. In return, the inventor must be amply paid for his contribution. Arago instructed Daguerre to cancel his January premiere and to suspend all attempts to market his photographic process. Arago would lead the effort to secure fair compensation for Daguerre from the French government. The campaign would begin immediately.

  On January 7, 1839, Arago announced and personally endorsed the daguerreotype process before the French Academy of Sciences. He told the body that he himself had taken and developed a picture; with care, he said, anyone can do it. Two noted academy members, Jean Baptiste Biot and Alexander von Humboldt, had independently examined specimens of Daguerre’s work, including views of Notre Dame, the Louvre, bridges over the Seine, and other Paris landmarks. They verified that the daguerreotype was a breakthrough and held vast promise for both the arts and the sciences. Symbolic of the latter, Daguerre had even produced a picture of the Moon; although blurred beyond recognition, it was only a matter of time, Arago insisted, before celestial imaging was brought to heel.