Talbot later recalled of his attempts to use the camera obscura, “This led me to reflect on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus—fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.” He began to think, “How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!”8
Perhaps Talbot then remembered Herschel’s experiment with the platinum salts, demonstrated at Babbage’s breakfast party. In any event, he claimed to have resolved at this point to begin experiments on the nitrate of silver, known to be “peculiarly sensitive to the action of light,” when he returned to England. He was back in England by January 1834, experimenting in his laboratory. That spring, when the better weather returned, he began to make images, painting with the sun. Within months, he had hit upon the basics of his new process.
AS TALBOT LABORED over his task—setting up what his wife would call his wooden “mousetraps” all over the lawn of Lacock Abbey—a Frenchman, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, was working on his own invention of a method for capturing the images made by a camera obscura. At the start of 1839, Daguerre trumpeted his success, without giving details of his method. Talbot was struck with terror that Daguerre had developed the same process as his own, which he was then calling “photogenic drawing.” His mother rubbed salt into his wounds. Why had he not announced his method years earlier? Now he was in danger of losing his claim to the invention altogether.9 Talbot did not need his mother’s insistence to realize how foolish he had been. A note in his diary in May 1834 instructed him to “Patent Photogenic Drawing,” but Talbot had never done so.10 Talbot quickly set about trying to establish the independent priority of his process.
As part of this effort, Talbot enlisted his friend Michael Faraday—who had come into his own as the foremost experimental scientist of the age—to announce his invention to the hundreds of people who by now were routinely attending Faraday’s Friday-evening lectures at the Royal Institution. On the twenty-fifth of January, a week before Talbot’s visit to Herschel, Faraday told the assembled crowd about the parallel discoveries of Daguerre and Talbot. “What man may hereafter do, now that Dame Nature has become his drawing mistress, it is impossible to predict!” Faraday exclaimed.11 On display were some examples of photogenic drawings—the first photographs ever seen by the British public. These included pictures of flowers and leaves and a piece of lace; a view of Venice copied from an engraving; images formed by setting up a microscope over the camera, including a cross-section of a slice of wood and the reticulations on the wing of an insect. There were also various images of Lacock Abbey, “the first instance … of a house having painted its own portrait!” Talbot crowed.12 Talbot happily reported that the evening had been “a little bit of magic realized—of natural magic.”13
Talbot’s next stop on his publicity tour was the Royal Society, where he read two papers, one in late January and one in February. At these meetings, the focus was on the more scientific, rather than artistic, aspects of the images displayed: “the delicate hairs on the leaves of plants,—the most minute and tiny bivalve calyx.” But even here the writer reporting on the meetings could not help waxing lyrical: “Nay, even a shadow, the emblem of all that is most fleeting in this world, is fettered by the spell of the invention.”14
In August Talbot showed off his photogenic drawings to an even larger gathering of British scientists: the British Association meeting, held in Birmingham that year. He brought one hundred of his specimens, which were displayed in glass cases throughout the conference. It would be the largest display of Talbot’s photogenic drawings ever exhibited. The meeting was darkened by the presence of the militia, which had been brought in to protect the members and their guests. Twice in July there had been riots sparked by the working-class Chartist movement, and the organizers of the British Association worried that there would be more violence.15 No violence materialized, and the event was a triumph for Talbot, who was about to embark on the campaign to convince the public that his photographic method was superior to Daguerre’s. Herschel was not present, but he sent a letter to be read by Whewell, who was president of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences section that year, describing his experiments on the action of infrared rays—which his father had discovered in 1800—on the specially treated paper.16
IT IS NOT surprising that photographic methods would be developed on both sides of the English Channel at around the same time. Experimenters in Britain and France had come tantalizingly close decades earlier. In 1794 Elizabeth Fulhame—wife of Dr. Thomas Fulhame, an Irish-born resident of Edinburgh who had studied with the famous chemist Joseph Black—had published a pamphlet titled “An essay on combustion, with a view to new art of dying and painting,” in which she suggested that patterns could be produced by depositing gold and other metals on cloth and exposing the material to the sun.17 Fulhame in this way introduced the idea of creating permanent images by the action of light.18
In the course of her numerous and difficult experiments on combustion, using sealed cylinders filled with gases, Fulhame realized that metallic deposits on cloth suspended in these cylinders were acted upon by the light of the sun. She suggested that silver and gold patterns could be formed on large pieces of cloth by pouring deposits of metals on the material and exposing it to the sun’s rays. While conducting her experiments, Fulhame met the chemist Joseph Priestley, who was intrigued by her work, and who encouraged her to publish her results. Her pamphlet was noticed in the periodicals of the day; the Transactions of the Royal Society published a notice of it, in which she was referred to as “the ingenious and lively Mrs. Fulhame.” Another review was breathlessly titled “A work on Combustion by a Lady!” Perhaps because of her gender, her suggestion about using the action of sun on metallic deposits was ignored, and she was forgotten until Herschel resurrected awareness of her work by referring to it in his first lecture on photography, delivered at the Royal Society in 1839.19
In 1802, eight years after Fulhame’s pamphlet appeared, Humphry Davy, then lecturing on chemistry at the Royal Institution, published a short account of the attempts of his friend Thomas Wedgwood (son of Josiah Wedgwood, the potter) to employ the camera obscura to take permanent images, what Wedgwood called “solar pictures.” Wedgwood was able to make the sort of shadowgrams that Talbot later produced: images of leaves and other objects placed directly on a treated piece of paper or white leather. These images remained susceptible to the action of light, however, and eventually faded away. As Talbot would later do, Wedgwood coated his paper or leather with nitrate of silver, but he failed to find a way to “fix” the images thus produced. Oddly enough, Davy, the most renowned chemist of the day, was unable to solve this problem. It would only be Herschel, some seventeen years later, who would stumble upon the solution.20 And then it would be another twenty years before Herschel’s solution would be applied to the problem of fixing these images painted by the light.21
More-recent work on photographic processes had been conducted in France. Like Talbot, Nicéphore Niépce had tried tracing the images created by a camera obscura, but Niépce had found even this too difficult. He looked for an alternative method of capturing pictures permanently. Niépce devised a process in which he dissolved bitumen in lavender oil, which was often used in varnishes. He then coated a sheet of pewter with the mixture. The sheet was placed in a camera obscura and exposed to the light for eight hours, which hardened the light-exposed bitumen. The sheet was then washed with lavender oil to remove the unexposed (unhardened) bitumen. He called this process heliographie, or “light-writing.” The first image made by heliography, in 1825, was a reproduction of a seventeenth-century engraving of a man leading a horse.
In 1827 Niépce traveled to England because his brother Claude, who had been trying to find a market for their internal combustion engine—the first one ever built, which the two brothers had
patented in 1807—was very ill. While in England, Niépce attempted to publicize his heliographic process. Niépce believed that the image produced in the hardened bitumen on the pewter sheet could be used as the basis for a printing plate, and he hoped that the British would be interested in the applications of his process to commercial printing.
Niépce submitted two papers on his process to the Royal Society, but neither was published. The reasons for their rejection remain shrouded in mystery. Davy, who had worked with Wedgwood on a process for using light to paint images, was then president of the society; Wollaston, who had invented the modern camera lucida and many of the lenses soon to be employed in the cameras used in the photographic process, was a vice president; and Herschel had only recently resigned as secretary: all of these men should have been most interested in Niépce’s work. But the conflict concerning the next president of the Royal Society—the stirrings of the “decline of science” debate—had thrown the society into disarray. The committee that reviewed paper submissions did not even meet between the summer of 1827 and the spring of 1828, the time at which Niépce submitted his papers.22
When Niépce dejectedly returned to France, he formed a partnership with Daguerre, and the two men continued to work on developing a process for creating lasting images. Niépce died in 1833, before any method had been publicly announced by the two men. At the beginning of 1839, Daguerre dramatically advertised his success at capturing the images of a camera obscura. But he did not release any details of his process—he was trying to pressure the French government to award him a lifelong pension, which it eventually did (the government also awarded a yearly stipend, though in a smaller amount, to Niépce’s estate). In May, when Herschel traveled to France for the wedding of his brother-in-law John Stewart, he met with Daguerre and saw his images. Herschel reported to Talbot—perhaps a bit insensitively, given that Talbot was still waiting anxiously to find out whether Daguerre’s process was the same as his—that “it is hardly saying too much to call [the images] miraculous.”23
When Daguerre released the details of his method in August 1839, Talbot was relieved to find that Daguerre’s process was quite different from his own. Daguerre’s process called for a highly polished silvered copper plate to be placed in a box filled with fumes of iodine. The tarnish formed on the plate was a light-sensitive silver iodide. The plate was then placed in a camera obscura at the focus of a camera lens and exposed to light anywhere from a few minutes to a quarter of an hour. Afterwards, the plate was removed and treated with mercury vapor. This caused the mercury to be deposited in tiny globules on those places on which the light had fallen, and a bright and very sharp image with a metallic sheen was thus produced. A wash in common table salt preserved the image.24
At first, Talbot’s photogenic drawings were thought to be vastly inferior to Daguerre’s invention, which required shorter exposure times and produced sharper images. Daguerre’s method, however, resulted in unique images that could not be copied. Talbot began to stress the superiority of his view on the basis of its production of images that could be copied many times over. Herschel would soon refer to these originals as “negatives,” which could be used to produce any number of “positives.” That is, the original image could itself be copied by the photographic process, in which case the lights and darks would be reversed once again. As Talbot put it, “The first drawing may serve as an object, to produce a second drawing, in which the lights and shadows would be reversed.”25
David Brewster pointed out in a laudatory article comparing Talbot’s and Daguerre’s methods, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1843, that there was another important benefit to Talbot’s method: its lower cost. A single daguerreotype—with its silver plate and glass covering—would cost at least five or six shillings to produce, while a photogenic drawing could be made for five or six pence.26 So Talbot’s method was better suited to popular uses, such as photographic portraiture, which soon developed into a thriving business. For the first time, people without great wealth could have their portraits taken, and keep photographs of loved ones. In the next decade the “carte-de-visite” process—a precursor to the photo-booth technique—would render portrait photography even less expensive, and create a rage for collecting these cards, known as “cardomania.” When Whewell consented to be photographed for one of these cards, he was shocked to find “my physiognomy staring at us from shop windows in half a dozen versions” all over Cambridge. He ruefully noted that “I think in general they are odious things … Justice without Mercy … for men, and Injustice without Mercy … for women.”27 Queen Victoria had cartes-de-visite made up of herself and Prince Albert with the children, and they sold by the millions. For the first time, people across Britain could see what their ruler looked like. (Many were dismayed to find that she looked like the dumpy middle-aged woman selling cakes in the local tea shop.)28
In his article, Brewster also took the opportunity to connect Talbot’s situation with the decline of science in Britain. In France, Daguerre and his new process had been taken up by the most famous French scientist of the day, François Arago, and had been lauded by the Academy of Sciences; he was then awarded a large pension by the French government. Talbot, on the contrary, had been mainly ignored by the Royal Society—which would not publish his papers until he revealed his entire process, and would not publish work he had published elsewhere—and he was offered no reward or pension by the British government. He was forced to find his reward in the long and arduous patent procedure, so it languished for years “in the labyrinths of Chancery Lane.”29
Brewster noted that this new technology of photography—in both its French and British forms—was one of the leading inventions of the day, along with railways, locomotive engines, steamboats, and the electromagnetic telegraph. It was certain to be transformative not only in the fine arts, but also in the “prosecution of physical science.30 Without being willing to use the new term coined by Whewell, with whom he was still feuding, Brewster had accepted his implicit analogy between “artist” and “scientist”: photography was a technology certain to be valuable in the toolkits of both.
Talbot began sending samples of his photogenic drawings to Babbage, who displayed them on a chiffonier at his Saturday evening soirées.31 Babbage had already seen some of Talbot’s earliest efforts, when he stayed at Lacock Abbey before the Bristol meeting of the British Association in 1836.32 Babbage’s guests found Talbot’s ghostly images to be strangely compelling. One reported that Talbot’s images “attracted great attention: the finest films of vegetable forms, and the minutest threads of the finest lacework, are shown with surprising delicacy and clearness.”33 After attending one of Babbage’s parties, Talbot proudly informed his wife that “my pictures had a great success at Mr. Babbage’s last night, Sir David Wilkie [the Scottish artist] and Sir Francis Chantrey [the sculptor] happened to be there and admired them.”34 For a later soirée, Talbot left five of his photogenic drawings: the exterior of Queen’s College, Oxford, the interior Quadrangle of University College, the boulevards of Paris, old books in his library, and the arch at Fontainbleau.35 Afterwards, Babbage told Talbot that the images were “much admired” at the party, and that he later lent them for a few hours to Lady Byron, the estranged wife of the poet, who enjoyed the “treat” with her daughter, Ada Lovelace.36
HERSCHEL’S EXPERIMENTS with light and shadows continued, and would soon result in two major breakthroughs: the first colored photographic image, a picture of the solar light spectrum; and the first glass negative, an image of his father’s huge telescope. Herschel was bringing the light of the heavens down to earth, and capturing it forever.
This period coincided with his realization that he would no longer be able to continue his nighttime explorations of the sky. As he wrote to a friend in January 1839, at age forty-six, “I fear my health will no longer suffer me to indulge the hope of prosecuting these enquiries myself further in this hemisphere. To my no small annoyance I find that night exposure �
� is more than I can now face, having been of late a sufferer from severe rheumatic afflictions which warn me pretty forcibly to desist.”37 From this point on, Herschel ceased activity as an observational astronomer. The great reflecting telescope was never again used after his return to England. Herschel was resolved that “with the publication of my South Africa observations (when it shall please God that shall happen) I have made up my mind to consider my astronomical career as terminated.”38 He returned to chemistry, his first love.
Throughout 1839, Herschel and Talbot were both feverishly experimenting, and sharing their results with each other by frequent letter. The weather was against them: 1839 was a miserable, dark year, with little of the sunshine necessary for bringing out the images. Herschel’s notebooks are filled with comments remarking on how “the sun is most baffling and disheartening—never was there such a summer for want of sunshine.”39 But he persevered.
Herschel’s notebooks contain vivid descriptions of his experiments and their results. He was using, it seems, all the contents of his chemistry set—ferrocyanate of potash, platina, prussiate potassium, silver acetate, silver nitrate, silver carbonate, bromide of silver, iodine, bromide of potash, ammonia, lead—as well as some substances not in his chemistry set. As Herschel explained, after “considering the instability of urea and its animal nature, and reasoning on the action of uric acid—I tried urea (in that state which nature provides it freely)” as a wash over silver nitrate, and found that “the effect is quite remarkable!”40 (Apparently he decided this method would not translate well into commercial applications of the photographic process.) During these days Margaret wrote to Caroline, “Herschel has also been busying himself about another favorite occupation … viz., the Photographic drawing which is now the scientific rage in the country. The process is not at all perfected yet, and Herschel is daily making great improvements in it.… I see Herschel so happy and so busy, about it, and trying new chemical substances every day, that I scarcely think of anything else myself.”41 He sent Aunt Caroline what he called “a sketch of the 40 feet [telescope] … made without hands, by Photography.”42
The Philosophical Breakfast Club Page 30
