Starlight Detectives

by Alan Hirshfeld

  Arago revealed nothing of the process itself, only sufficient facts to galvanize the gathered members of the academy and the press. Obligingly, one art critic wrote afterward, “You can now say to the towers of Notre Dame: place yourselves [on this photographic plate], and the towers will obey, brought home in their entirety.” In his own way, Arago had outdone Louis Daguerre, promoter extraordinaire.

  Arago’s surprise announcement made an unexpected ripple in England. Gentleman-scientist William Henry Fox Talbot hastily addressed the Royal Society on January 31, 1839, claiming to be the true inventor of chemical imaging. Talbot’s process, the calotype, developed in 1835, produced low-grade, negative images on photo-sensitized paper. Unlike irreproducible daguerreotypes, a calotype negative could be used to generate any number of positive contact prints. Although Talbot’s method of printing from negatives would ultimately become the model for chemical imaging, the calotype did not reach an acceptable level of refinement until 1841. By that time, the daguerreotype had achieved widespread acceptance. It didn’t help that Talbot patented the calotype, which further hindered its adoption among professional photographers.

  François Arago.

  Arago introduced a bill into the French Parliament that would pay Daguerre for rights to his process. He did his utmost to raise expectations of the daguerreotype’s aesthetic, scientific, and economic benefits, while coyly avoiding any public exhibitions of the pictures or release of procedural details. At every opportunity, he showed sample images to fellow legislators. Meanwhile, Daguerre found himself the object of international attention. Samuel Morse visited him in March, Sir John Herschel and James Watt in May. Already Herschel had promulgated the catch-all term photography— “writing with light” (previously coined by German astronomer Johann von Maedler). All expressed astonishment at the quality of Daguerre’s pictures. Herschel supposedly confided to Arago “that compared to these masterpieces of Daguerre, Monsieur Talbot produces nothing but vague, foggy things. There is as much difference between these two products as there is between the moon and the sun.” Herschel informed his friend Talbot, adding, “It is hardly saying too much to call them miraculous. . . . I can not counsel you better than to come and see.”

  On August 7, 1839, after affirmation by both chambers of Parliament, King Louis Philippe signed the agreement to provide an annual lifelong pension of six-thousand francs for Daguerre (later raised to ten thousand), and four-thousand francs for Niépce’s son Isadore in exchange for rights to the daguerreotype. The settlement couldn’t have come at a better time for Daguerre; the Diorama, his sole source of income, had burned to the ground the previous March. In voting to grant the pension, legislator Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, himself a prominent chemist and physicist, acknowledged that Daguerre’s process “must have been very difficult to discover, and must have cost, in order to reach the perfection which it has attained from Mr. Daguerre, much time, numberless attempts, and above all a most wonderful perseverance which is strongly excited by failure and which never belongs but to those who are gifted with strong minds.”

  Arago announced a special joint meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts for August 19, 1839, at which the secret of the daguerreotype would be disclosed. The auditorium at the Palace of the Institute of France was crammed to capacity two hours before the presentation was to start, with several hundred disappointed spectators relegated to the courtyard. Every once in a while, someone would emerge from the hall and relate to the exiled throng fragments of what was being said inside.

  With Louis Daguerre and Isadore Niépce sitting silently at his side, Arago revealed the process step by step:

  1.Polish a silver-coated copper plate to a mirrorlike finish, then wash off all residue with diluted nitric acid.

  2.Fume the plate in iodine vapor until uniformly golden brown, evidence that the requisite amount of light-sensitive silver iodide has been formed on the plate’s surface. (Iodine vapor must be used, as silver does not react with iodine in solution.)

  3.Insert the prepared plate into the camera and expose it anywhere from three to thirty minutes, depending on the time of day, season, and weather conditions. Incident light sunders the silver iodide, and leaves a greater or lesser number of elemental silver particles at various locations on the plate, thereby delineating the scene before the camera. The recorded image is as yet latent and not discernible to the eye.

  4.Remove the plate and expose it to hot mercury vapor, which renders the latent image visible. The silver and mercury atoms combine into an amalgam, which appears whiter than the plate’s original silver coating. The amalgam maps out the highlights of the image, while the iodized silver maps out the shadows.

  5.Fix the image by immersing the plate in sodium thiosulfate, or “hypo,” which removes any remnant silver iodide. (Both Daguerre and Talbot had fixed their early photographs in hot salt water, but adopted John Herschel’s use of hypo when announced in early 1839. In 1840, Arago’s twenty-year-old student Hippolyte Fizeau discovered that gilding finished plates with gold chloride is even more effective.)

  6.A series of thorough rinses in water completes the process.

  Arago admonished would-be photographers to admire their art with the eyes and not the fingers. A completed daguerreotype, he warned, is as fragile as the dust on a butterfly’s wing, and must immediately be secured under glass. Varnishes were ineffective and dulled the glorious sheen of the picture.

  The conclusion of Arago’s speech brought cheers from the normally grave assembly. In the aftermath, one eyewitness reported that “opticians’ shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first trial got a silhouette of roof tops against the sky. He went into ecstasies over chimneys, counted over and over roof tiles and chimney bricks, was astonished to see the very mortar between the bricks—in a word, the technique was so new that even the poorest plate gave him indescribable joy.” However astonishing the results, many tyros were put off by the daguerreotype’s complexity, bulkiness, and high cost—around two months’ living for the ordinary Frenchman. (Of course, today we recoil at the idea of inhaling toxic mercury fumes.)

  Daguerre marketed his own version of the camera, which carried an extravagant seal bearing his signature. At government insistence, he delivered a series of demonstrations of the process and released a seventy-nine page, illustrated instruction manual. By year’s end, thirty editions of the manual had appeared in various languages.

  Within a week of Arago’s lecture, London’s Globe published a how-to article on the daguerreotype, and within a month, Daguerre’s manual arrived in New York. No country saw a more enthusiastic response to the advent of photography than the United States. The editor of the Knickerbocker gushed, “We have seen the views taken in Paris by the ‘Daguerreotype’ and have no hesitation in avowing that they are the most remarkable objects of curiosity and admiration, in the arts, that we ever beheld. Their exquisite perfection almost transcends the bounds of sober belief.”

  The Boston Courier described the daguerreotype as “a mirror which, after having received your image, gives you back your portrait, indelible as a picture, and a much more exact resemblance. . . . They are not paintings, they are drawings; but drawings pushed to a degree of perfection that art never can reach.” In Daguerre’s pictures of Paris, the report continues, “[W]e distinguish the smallest details, we count the stones of the pavement, we see the moisture produced by the rain, we read the sign of a shop. Every thread of luminous tissue has passed from the object to the [plate].”

  Elizabeth Barrett (Browning) confided to her friend Mary Russell Mitford that—damn the painters—she wanted a daguerreotype of everyone dear to her in the world: “It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases—but the association, and the sense of nearness involved in the thing . . . the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixe
d for ever!”

  Upon receiving his copy of the manual in the first shipment stateside, Samuel Morse daguerreotyped the Unitarian Church near New York University. Studios sprang up in major cities and remote hamlets, photography journals appeared, and hopeful experimenters tried to improve the process. Already by December 1839, a group of enthusiasts in Philadelphia found that silver bromide works more quickly than Daguerre’s silver iodide, reducing exposure times and providing a pathway to practical portraiture. (Hippolyte Fizeau, in France, had reached the same conclusion, but delayed publication in deference to Daguerre.) By 1853, there were more than one hundred daguerreotype establishments in New York City alone, and some three million daguerreotypes taken nationwide annually. François Arago’s expansive vision of photography’s economic payoff was coming true, although in large measure across the Atlantic. Of course, if money can be made, the entrepreneur is not far behind: on June 22, 1846, Mr. A. W. Van Alstin, a photographer in Lowell, Massachusetts, was arrested for taking and distributing “daguerreotype likenesses of naked females.”

  Although most early daguerreotypists directed their efforts to earthbound scenes, the celestial realm beckoned those seeking a challenge. The obstacles were many. With the notable exceptions of the Sun, which was too dazzling to be favorably captured on a sensitized plate, and the Moon, which was only barely bright enough, celestial objects were too dim to leave any impression at all. To photograph the Sun required a shutter mechanism as rapid as an eye blink. To photograph the Moon meant a long time-exposure, during which Earth’s rotation effectively smears out the lunar image. (Just ask Daguerre.) Also, the Sun and the Moon each span a measly half-degree in the sky. The towers of Notre Dame are compelling in a photograph; a tiny circle of light against a featureless background far less so. A camera view through a telescope is required to magnify the Sun or the Moon to reasonable proportions on the plate. Of course, that simultaneously magnifies the smudging effect of our spinning Earth. Despite the hurdles, a few adventurous daguerreotypists raised their cameras to the heavens.

  In March 1840, New York University chemistry professor John W. Draper followed up on Daguerre’s failed attempt to daguerreotype the Moon. Draper was an acknowledged expert on the behavior of photosensitive substances. He knew that the daguerreotype plate was only marginally sensitive enough for use in astronomy, where the incident light levels are typically very low. Not only that, the plate is sensitive only to a restricted range of the light spectrum: most sensitive to blue-violet (“chemical”) rays, as well as ultraviolet (“actinic”) rays, but virtually blind to yellow, orange, or red. How effectively the Moon would register on the daguerreotype plate depended on which colors of sunlight it reflected back to Earth.

  John William Draper.

  Atop a building on Manhattan’s Washington Square, Draper secured a camera—actually a cigar box with a lens—at the focus of a five-inch-aperture refractor telescope. A twenty-minute exposure garnered a lunar image about an inch across. Although he tried to track the Moon’s gradual movement with his telescope, the coordination was insufficient: only major lunar gradations were recorded; the rest of the features were indistinct. (Draper’s pioneering photograph was destroyed in a fire at the New York Lyceum of Natural History in 1866; his subsequent lunar images, in the archives of New York University, have completely faded.)

  John Draper is further credited with one of the earliest daguerreotype portraits taken from life, an iconic image of his sister Dorothy, acquired in a sixty-second exposure in 1840. To maximize the concentration of light falling on the plate, he fitted a camera with a wide, short-focus lens and situated the plate at the convergent point for blue-violet light, the camera’s so-called chemical focus. For Draper’s camera, this was three-tenths of an inch closer to the lens than the “visual focus.” What looks distinct to the eye at the visual focus comes out blurred on the daguerreotype.

  After several trials, Draper stopped whitening his sister’s face with powder and accepted her natural complexion. To keep her from squinting and perspiring, he illuminated her with sunlight filtered through a blue solution of copper sulfate, reducing the solar glare while preserving the primary rays for the daguerreotype. He also secured her head in an iron rest, which became a notorious accessory in portrait studios. Dorothy’s exquisite, flower-framed face bears a hint of a Mona Lisa smile—or perhaps it’s a sign of resignation. (Draper presented the portrait as a gift to Sir John Herschel. It is now in the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.)

  Draper’s photograph of the Moon was followed by a series of successful astronomical images during the daguerreotype’s first—and, as it happens, only—decade. The solar eclipse of July 8, 1842 was captured in a two-minute exposure by Giovanni Alessandro Majocchi, professor of physics in Milan. Majocchi’s attempt to record the Sun’s diaphanous corona failed. (The first successful daguerreotype of the solar corona was obtained in Königsberg, Germany during the eclipse of July 28, 1851.) John Draper and Edmond Becquerel, a talented Arago protégé, independently photographed the Sun’s spectrum in 1843, displaying its famous Fraunhofer lines. On April 2, 1845, two other scientists in Arago’s circle, Léon Foucault and Hippolyte Fizeau, obtained in a one-sixtieth-second exposure, the sought-after daguerreotype of the Sun itself, showing a vivid pair of sunspot groups. A lithograph of the picture was featured in Arago’s book Astronomie Populaire.

  The first decade of celestial photography closed with a multiple exposure of the full Moon taken with a portrait camera on September 1, 1849, by Samuel Dwight Humphrey, a daguerreotypist in Canandaigua, New York. More distinct than John Draper’s flawed landmark image of 1840, the plate holds nine lunar portraits of various exposures, from a half-second to two minutes, each a mere tenth of an inch wide. The Moon’s disk hardly registers in the shortest exposures, and trails into an oblong streak in the longest. But the three-second exposure portrays an unmistakable, alien geography—one that had long been scrutinized by eye, sketched by hand, limned by poets. In Humphrey’s daguerreotype, however imperfect, the Moon appears with stark objectivity, its rocky, incontrovertible truth made plain for anyone to see.

  Humphrey rushed his Moon portrait to Jared Sparks, president of Harvard University, who pronounced it a “curious and ingenious specimen of art” and foresaw a day when the camera’s “exactness” might be applied to lunar mapmaking. Before year’s end, Harvard astronomer William Bond and Boston photographer John Whipple affixed a camera to the tail-end of the Great Refractor and pointed the instrument at the Moon.

  Samuel Humphrey’s multiple-exposure daguerreotype of the moon, 1849.

  Chapter 4

  SUMMITS OF SILVER

  It clear’d off afternoon. I came home early to prepare for the reception of the Public. Mr. Whipple has brought out his apparatus for the purpose of attempting to take a Daguerreotype of the Moon and Sun, by aid of the great Telescope.

  —From William Cranch Bond’s diary entry, October 23, 1847

  THE DOOR OF OPPORTUNITY SWUNG WIDE for young John Adams Whipple in 1840 in the form of an overheard conversation at a scientific supply shop in Boston. Recently arrived from rural Grafton, Massachusetts, the ambitious Whipple wondered how he might use his precocious knowledge of chemistry to best advantage. His childhood passion for chemical experimentation had mystified his parents, who feared that every penny their son spent on the noxious hobby was a penny wasted. Of necessity, he had become expert on “doing things with nothing to do with,” so when details of Frenchman Louis Daguerre’s remarkable photographic process reached tiny Grafton in late 1839, Whipple slapped a lens onto a candle box and recorded an image on the handle of a chemically treated silver spoon. Now, at eighteen, Whipple was a walking compendium of chemical know-how.

  Perusing the wares in the scientific supply shop, Whipple could have regaled the merchant with a rundown of how various compounds change color, smell, froth, explode, even blacken in the light of the Sun. But his ears perked up when a customer requested some
“chloride of iodine,” a substance recently said to increase the light-sensitivity of daguerreotype plates. A city-wide search had turned up no source of the chemical. The shop owner likewise claimed ignorance. Whipple approached the customer and offered to make chloride of iodine on the spot. A few hours later, production complete, Whipple received his first earnings as a chemist.

  John Adams Whipple.

  By 1842, Whipple was running a successful chemical supply house that catered to the needs of local daguerreotype studios. He took up photography himself, exhibiting his pictures at the city’s annual artisans’ exhibition as early as 1841. Although he had long tolerated the toxic emissions of his private chemistry experiments, Whipple grew increasingly ill from the fumes of wholesale chemical manufacture. He saw no choice but to recast himself as a full-time portrait photographer. Within a few years, his studio was competing head-to-head with Boston’s preeminent firm of Southworth and Hawes. Whipple’s chemical and mechanical adeptness proved vital to his business success; yet he also had an artistic eye, whether capturing a thousand-person church gathering at Plymouth Rock or an intimate close-up of a sweet-faced child. Among his eventual portrait subjects were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Daniel Webster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Louis Agassiz.