The Philosophical Breakfast Club (40 page)

Talbot was present at a breakfast at Babbage’s house where Herschel showed off his experiment with the platinum salts, as were David Brewster and the geologist-chemist Robert Brown. In the article announcing this result, published the following year, Herschel noted that hyposulphites dissolve the unreduced salts of silver, writing that “the light sensitive platinum compounds can be distinguished from those of silver by the latter’s solubility in the liquid hyposulphites.”
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This paper was read at the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1832—though not by Herschel, who was in Europe at the time. Herschel’s interest in pursuing this line of investigation waned as he began planning his trip to the Cape Colony.

Talbot, on the other hand, found himself on an extended honeymoon in northern Italy in the fall of 1833. As the Herschels had done, Talbot and his new wife, Constance, tried to capture memories of their
honeymoon by making sketches with a camera lucida. Unlike Herschel, however, Talbot found the camera lucida difficult to use. Indeed, a certain kind of artistic and technical skill is needed to produce accurate images with it, skill that Talbot lacked. Being nearly blind in one eye also handicapped Talbot’s efforts.
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He turned to the camera obscura, which requires less drafting ability on the part of the artist.

The camera obscura (Latin for “veiled room”) was originally a small box with a hole at one end, through which light passed and projected an accurate image of a scene upside down on a screen or piece of paper (unlike with the camera lucida, the image really was cast onto the paper; it was not a mere optical illusion). The image could then be traced over to produce an accurate drawing of the scene. In the eighteenth century, a version was developed in which an angled mirror was used to project a right-side-up image directly onto tracing paper on the glass top of the box. It was this form of a camera obscura that would be used later by Talbot to take his first images drawn by light. But when he initially turned to the camera obscura in 1833, Talbot was merely trying to improve his ability at sketching the scenery around him. Herschel’s easy talent with the camera lucida might have been what kept him from being the one to first experiment with making permanent images with a camera obscura, even though he was the first to achieve the necessary chemical results.

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!”
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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.

A
S
T
ALBOT 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Talbot happily reported that the evening had been “a little bit of magic realized—of natural magic.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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I
T 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.
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Fulhame in this way introduced the idea of creating permanent images by the action of light.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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