The year 1839, when the daguerreotype and photogenic drawing were introduced to the public, is a largely symbolic date, for it represents only the year in which the new art was revealed. Its invention had occurred in stages, incorporating many earlier developments in chemistry, physics, and the visual arts. The history of photographic invention may be loosely divided into three parts: photographic prehistory; the years 1790-1838; and the public announcement of photographic processes in 1839. Photographic prehistory, that is, events impinging on photography in the period before 1790, saw the establishment of an underlying structure of thought and technology in Western art and science enabling photography to be both desired and invented. After 1790, and especially in the first decades of the 1800s, numerous ‘proto-photographers’ began making deliberate experimental steps towards photographic imaging. The first published details in 1839 expanded the inventing from the private sphere of a handful of isolated individuals to the more public and accessible one of artists and scientists worldwide.
Photographic prehistory
Although the term ‘prehistory’ of photography is sometimes used to cover all experiments up to 1839, it is most appropriate for the earliest period of technical and thematic development. Its scientific and artistic roots date back to antiquity and evince tempting photographic hints up to the dawn of the 19th century. In this early history, two strands of investigation emerge. Advances in optical and chemical technology provided the mechanisms on which photography would rely. These mechanisms would have gone unused, however, had the public not developed an appreciation of images that purported to be more accurate, and therefore more truthful. These two strands can be found in the development of linear perspective, in the use of drawing machines, in the growing consumption of public entertainment and illustrated literature, and in the increasingly experimental investigation of the natural world.
Linear perspective came into widespread use in Italy in the 15th century. The desire for images that deceive the eye, trompe l'œil, encouraged the adaptation of architectural and scientific measuring instruments to drawing machines. These devices, one of the simplest being the camera obscura, aided artists in creating mathematically precise spatial depictions in single-or multiple-point perspective. Images made with the help of instruments like the camera obscura, and later the camera lucida, were considered more true to nature, or more real.
The camera obscura was made famous by Giovanni Battista della Porta's Magiœ Naturalis (1558), which was translated and reprinted countless times and reached the height of its popularity in Europe in the 17th century. In it, Porta treated the camera obscura as an instrument of entertainment, physics, and a bit of natural magic—rather as photography would be treated two centuries later. His treatise made the device more desirable, and the desire for such instruments in turn made his treatise famous. The mid-17th century was also a time when artists like Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) and Jan Vermeer (1632-75) became interested in pre-photographic imaging devices like the camera obscura, and had increasing access to them. The use of mirrors and lenses to scrutinize nature, both for the purposes of science and for the purposes of art, became commonplace.
However, without some advance in the understanding of the physics of light and also chemistry, the images thus created were, in Henry Talbot's famous words, nothing but ‘fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away’. Classical philosophers had remarked on the light emitted from living organisms like cuttlefish and fireflies, and also on decaying vegetable matter. But it was not until 1602 that a man-made phosphorus existed. Vincenzo Cascariolo accidentally created a powder of barium sulphide, by treating his so-called ‘Bolognian Stone’ with charcoal in a furnace. When exposed to light, the powder then emitted light. In the first instance, this accidental invention allowed for the realization that light and heat did not always act in tandem. Importantly for photography, it also introduced the notion of ‘insolation’—the practice of exposing a substance to the sun's rays in order to bring about a certain effect.
Cascariolo's work encouraged many similar experiments. A century and a half later, while attempting to create Baldewin's phosphor, Johann Heinrich Schulze (1687-1744) discovered what he called ‘scotophorus’. This mixture of chalk (calcium carbonate) suspended in an aqueous solution of silver nitrate, darkened when exposed to solar radiation. Schulze recognized not only that light, as opposed to heat, was responsible for the change, but that silver was essential to the process. He then proceeded to cut stencils and create images suspended in the solution. In creating these, albeit transient, images Schulze made primitive photographic experiments.
In fact the change of colour in silver compounds exposed out of doors had been noted already by Georgius Fabricius (1516-71), if not earlier. Most experiments were conducted using horn silver (luna cornea), an ore from German silver mines. This substance could also be prepared artificially by adding salt to a solution of silver nitrate.
Substances that darkened by the aid of the sun were not as sought after as those that were luminous, perhaps because of an ancient association of darkness with evil, or because there seemed to be less practical use for darkness than for light. It was not long, however, before the darkening of chlorides and nitrates of silver became a standard part of physical experiments on the solar spectrum. Carl Vilhelm Scheele (1742-86) and Jean Senebier (1742-1809) both cast the image of the solar spectrum on silver compounds, measuring the darkening effects of the various colours of light in the spectrum. They established that the violet or blue end of the spectrum was by far the more chemically active.
Not all expressions of interest in instantaneous and mechanical images were accompanied by chemical experimentation. Tiphaigne de la Roche's (1729-74) novel Giphantie à Babylon (1760) so convincingly described the idea of a mirror retaining perfectly the view reflected in it that it had made its way into photographic history by the 1860s. Although the best known, Giphantie is not the only written description of such an idea. On 12 November 1769 the German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99) recorded in his notebook a conversation with a friend regarding the practical possibilities of fixing the image of the camera obscura, and in 1791 the British writer (and theorist of the picturesque) William Gilpin (1724-1804) expressed the desire to fix the image reflected in a Claude glass. Less concrete examples of such a bent for instant, optically created images can be found in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who sought to describe the experience of a moment flashed on his eye. A similar idea can be found in the ‘arrested transience’ of the topographical and meteorological paintings of John Constable (1776-1837).
These might be seen as sophisticated manifestations of a widespread desire for images based on the direct copying of nature, or objects in nature. The tracing of shadows was eulogized in Pliny's tale of the Corinthian maid, fabled to have invented painting by tracing the outline of her lover's shadow. In the late 18th century the making of such ‘skiagrams’ or ‘silhouettes’, using instruments like the Physionotrace, became fashionable. Likewise, there were instruments for enlarging or copying drawings and even machines for copying sculptures. Demand for such devices helped prepare the market for photography, once it had been perfected.
Photographic experiments to 1838
In the late 18th century there was a significant increase in specific experiments intended to create images chemically. It was generated by two distinct desires: for faithful, inexpensive, and quick copies or representations of nature; and for an accurate visual recording device for use in science. Cross-fertilization between scientific and artistic interests and needs was common, for instance in notions of colour, in the reproduction of natural phenomena, and in the illustration of scientific texts. Some individuals, mostly working in isolation from one another, began to seek a chemical solution to the creation of wholly mechanical, and thus more true, representation. Those who recognized and experimented with the interaction of light and chemicals, but did not make permanent images in the camera obscura, may be called proto-photographers.
Of these proto-photographers Elizabeth Fulhame was the first to publish. Her Essay on Combustion (1794) contributed greatly to the understanding of the chemical precipitation of metals, a necessary condition of chemical fixing. But Fulhame has primarily been recognized as a proto-photographer by her use of silver salts to stain patterns and designs on cloth. She also suggested that the method could be applied to painting and map-making. Better known were Thomas Wedgwood's attempts at the turn of the 19th century to ‘fix the image of the camera obscura’. His friend and sometime collaborator Humphry Davy (1778-1829) discussed these experiments in the Journal of the Royal Institution in 1802. Wedgwood's attempts were also mentioned in William Thomas Brande's 1819 Manual of Chemistry, published many times in the USA and Britain. The 1836 British edition of this manual described Wedgwood's and others' experiments in detail. However, their fundamental shortcoming was failure to fix the image—i.e. to prevent further darkening by exposure to light—after it had been formed.
While some proto-photographers like Fulhame and Wedgwood attempted to make designs or images, Sir John Herschel continued the tradition of analysing the solar spectrum. In 1831 he demonstrated the formation of a weak image of the spectrum with platinum salts, a demonstration attended by Talbot, among others. His first contribution to photography had been made in 1819, when he noticed and published the property exhibited by hyposulphites of dissolving unreduced salts of silver. This observation proved to be the basis for photographic fixer, or ‘hypo’—a discovery which it took Herschel very little time to recognize in 1839.
In the early 19th century many other individuals may have experimented with solar images. The chief factors contributing to this rise in experimentation were the ready availability of the chemical knowledge, the popularity of projection-based drawing instruments like the camera obscura and camera lucida, and the growing market for inexpensive illustrations. However, it is difficult to verify exactly what experiments were conducted by whom and when. Many of the trials were intended as parlour amusements and remained unpublished, their authors recounting them only in the early months of 1839. Among suspected or confirmed proto-photographers are Mungo Ponton (1802-80; Scotland), Samuel Morse (USA), James Miles Wattles (USA), Hercules Florence (Brazil), Thomas Young (1773-1829; England), Andreas Friedrich Gerber (1797-1872; Switzerland), and the French physicist J. A. C. Charles (1742-1823). None of these men published or patented their processes, and little is known about most of them, but they testify to the burgeoning interest in such images. In the midst of all this photographic experimentation, those individuals who eventually made permanent solar images in the camera obscura were beginning their own attempts at the ‘fixing of images’. They are considered the primary inventors of photography.
Working in complete isolation from Wedgwood and Fulhame, and also in the 1790s, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce began the experiments that would lead him to what he called héliographie. His goal was less the scientific investigation of nature, or the creation of multiple designs, but rather the multiple reproduction of landscape views made in the camera obscura. Although François Arago claimed in 1839 that J. A. C. Charles had demonstrated imaging with silver salts to the Parisian scientific public c.1800, Niépce's work proceeded independently of Parisian scientific circles. His early experiments from 1816 to the late 1820s were conducted for two distinct ends: the copying of engravings or other printed material, and the formation of images in the camera obscura. His determination to create a positive image, as well as his interest in engraving from the images, led him away from early attempts with silver chloride on paper towards more solid, and more reflective, surfaces of pewter, stone, glass, and silver. Although silver and pewter plates did allow the image to appear positive by reflection, his colleague, the Parisian engraver Augustin Lemaître (1797-1870), was unable to find a satisfactory method for engraving the faint images. After years of trail and experiment, Niépce succeeded in copying an engraving in 1822 and making, in 1824, a point de vue—a positive (but difficult to view) image made in the camera obscura. Although accounts of his earliest experiments have not survived, his letters tell us these images were created by the unique use of a thin varnish of the resinous asphalt bitumen of Judea, dissolved in oil of lavender, on bases of stone and glass. He later applied the same process to pewter. In a letter of September 1824, he declared to his brother that this stage signalled his success.
According to some accounts, it was the same year, 1824, that Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre borrowed a laboratory to investigate the possibility of fixing images by sunlight. Although his exact experiments are not known, Daguerre did try various substances, including phosphorus and silver compounds. His experiments had not progressed beyond what he called dessin fumé, a type of cliché-verre, when, in 1826, he was informed by the Paris optician Charles Chevalier of Niépce's work. Daguerre initiated the first contact and they met in Paris in 1827, after which Niépce travelled on to England to visit his brother Claude.
On his arrival in Kew, Niépce found his brother in a state of precarious mental, physical, and financial health, and their jointly developed internal combustion engine, the pyréolophore, unadvanced and unsold. Frustrated in his initial purpose, Niépce turned to promoting his photographic invention. The Royal Society was, however, in disarray and its Committee of Papers did not meet during Niépce's visit. He was unable to present a formal paper to scientists in London, and neither Herschel nor Talbot heard about or saw the results of the heliographic process. Although Niépce found an enthusiastic friend in the Royal Society member and botanical illustrator Francis Bauer, he failed to interest other scientists or artists in London. While Niépce's visit to Britain in the winter of 1827 was, by all accounts, a promotional failure, it did provide us with the earliest surviving example of a photographic plate made in a camera obscura. It also compelled Niépce to provide a public name, héliographie, for his process. He returned to his estate of Gras in debt, leaving Bauer with several images, among them the now celebrated View from the Study Window: a direct-positive, laterally reversed image that Niépce had made the previous summer with an exposure of probably 2-3 days.
By 1829, Niépce had renewed his researches and entered into a partnership with Daguerre that was to lead directly to the invention and perfection of the daguerreotype in the 1830s. Unfortunately, none of their images from this period has survived. Niépce's experiments with silver iodide as a light-sensitive compound were an important step forward, but he died suddenly in 1833 and was succeeded by his son Isidore (1805-68) in the partnership with Daguerre. The further specific steps leading to the highly detailed, positive daguerreotype as it was revealed to the public in 1839 remain unknown. However, Daguerre's own crucial discovery of mercury vapour as a means of developing the latent image, and salt as a fixer, evidently took place between 1835 and late 1837.
At Lacock, England, Talbot was conducting his own experiments on the imaging process that was to rival Daguerre's in 1839. Talbot explained his interest in his poetic reminiscence of a failed attempt at drawing with a camera lucida on the shores of Lake Como in 1833. One of the best-known narratives of photography's genesis, it was published twice, first in February 1839 as Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, and again in 1844 in the first fascicle of The Pencil of Nature. Talbot came to his experiments relatively late, beginning his attempts at photography in the spring of 1834. But he achieved his desired result more rapidly than anyone else, attaining stabilized images almost immediately. However, within the year, he set aside his experiments in favour of more pressing concerns in optics, biblical studies, and integral calculus.
The mechanism used by Talbot was similar to Fulhame's and Wedgwood's. It was also much the same process tried by any number of proto-photographers, and Niépce in 1816. Talbot brushed writing paper with a salt solution, and then with a solution of silver nitrate, creating a light-sensitive silver chloride. Exposing this to sunlight created a visible image, without the need for further development, but this action took place very slowly. He observed very quickly that different strengths of the salt solution affected the sensitivity of the resulting chloride; more salt equalled less sensitivity. Using a strong salt solution after exposure, he stabilized (i.e. temporarily fixed) the print, which was, in the first instance, a negative. Once stabilized, it was possible to print through the negative and obtain the reverse, in this case a positive image. In his working notebooks, Talbot privately named the paper ‘sciagraphic’ or ‘photogenic’ paper; it was not until January 1839 that he chose ‘photogenic drawing’.
Talbot conducted further experiments in Geneva in the autumn of 1834. Letters from his family indicate that he shared these images, but apparently only within his extended family, not with the public. It is from the summer of 1835 that his earliest camera obscura negatives survive, made in miniature, specially constructed cameras. Talbot later wrote that this was the summer of his most prolific photographic experiments before 1839. The best known of these early images is a photogenic drawing of the
Public announcement, 1839
The photographic events of the first half of 1839 were largely dominated by the public announcements of the two inventors, Daguerre and Talbot, and two scientists, Arago and Herschel. Their papers, comments, and the larger debate about priority was recorded in minute detail in popular magazines and in the reports of the two largest scientific institutions, the Comptes rendus of the Académie des Sciences in Paris, and the Transactions of the Royal Society in London. Although these scientific reports were not widely available at the time, the subsequent history of the invention has depended heavily on them.
The timing of the public announcement of the daguerreotype appears to have been precipitated by events in 1838. The process had been improved sufficiently for Daguerre and Isidore Niépce to attempt its sale by subscription. Although this proved unsuccessful, the partners did attract the attention of the permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences, Arago, who stated later that he understood immediately the significance of the invention for the advancement of physics, especially the study of light. It was this understanding that set him about preparing the announcement and gaining the interest of government. In 1838 Talbot had also begun to gather together his photographic results with the intention of publishing them.
The announcement of the daguerreotype was made to a meeting of the Académie des Sciences by Arago and the physicist Jean Baptiste Biot (1774-1862) on 7 January 1839. No practical details of the process were described. Talbot, unaware of the differences between his process and Daguerre's, hastened to show a number of specimens. He took examples made in 1835 to scientific friends nearby, or sent them folded up in a letter. The first public showing of Talbot's images was on 25 January 1839, at the Royal Institution's Friday evening lecture, presided over by Michael Faraday and attended by more than 300 people. That same day, Talbot sent his first letter about photography to his long-time colleague Herschel. Within five days, driven by curiosity and primed by a lifetime of experimental work, Herschel succeeded in forming an image in the camera obscura and fixing it with hyposulphite. On 31 January, the day that Talbot's first paper on photography was being read before the Royal Society, Herschel was able to display his own photographic process when Talbot came to visit.
In France, Arago and Biot were alerted to the rival process by letters from Talbot. Biot reacted by striking up a dialogue with his English colleague. Arago pressed on with his championing of Daguerre's priority. The task of convincing the French government to buy an invention from which it would not profit possibly led Arago to defend Daguerre's status as sole and independent inventor more vigorously than, as a scientist, he might otherwise have done. In the end, he achieved his aim, although his methods earned him enemies and detractors. The government paid Daguerre a pension of 6, 000 francs; Isidore Niépce received 4, 000. But this triumph for Arago, Daguerre, and Niépce came at a heavy price for other inventors.
The debate over priority of invention in photography had several effects. The most apparent was the writing of many histories legitimizing one inventor over another as the ‘first’. More subtle, but perhaps more damaging for the history of photography, was the quiet suppression of independent advances in photographic imaging in early 1839. It was a time of widespread and fruitful experimentation. The mere suggestion of a method of imaging chemically by the action of sunlight stimulated a number of scientists and artists to experiment. Herschel, aside from making photographs using ‘vegetable colours’ in the search for colour photography, publicly established the name ‘photography’ in March, and in the same paper illustrated a scientific finding with a photograph. Mungo Ponton established the sensitivity of bichromate of potash, laying the foundations for gum printing. In Munich, probably early in 1839, the astronomer and mathematician Carl August von Steinheil and the mineralogist Franz von Kobell (1803-82) created several 42 × 42 mm (c.1 5/8 × 1 5/8 in) paper negatives of buildings in the city; Steinheil announced the details of their process to a committee of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences on 13 April. Hippolyte Bayard developed a direct positive process on paper, and exhibited his own photographs in June 1839. Many more individuals attempted to make images from their knowledge or suspected knowledge of the daguerreotype and photogenic drawing. In Switzerland Andreas Friedrich Gerber (1797-1872), in America John William Draper (1811-82) and probably Edward Everett Hale and Samuel Longfellow, and in Wales the Llewelyns conducted experiments in the spring of 1839, and were able to produce results in spite of the sketchy nature of their information.
In February 1839 in England (April in the USA), Talbot had published the working methods for his photogenic drawing as well as his own and Herschel's methods of stabilizing and ‘washing out’. Talbot's inventions of photogenic drawing and, in 1840, the negative-positive calotype process provided the template on which virtually all photography would be based until the digital age. However, the daguerreotype, with its silver surface and minute detail, became initially the favoured medium and remained so for the next decade in both Europe and, especially, the USA. On 19 August the details of the daguerreotype process were released to the public. These announcements of 1839 opened a new era of photographic discovery, innovation, and commercial use that soon escaped the confines of the West and extended across the globe.
— Kelley E. Wilder
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