The Philosophical Breakfast Club (41 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.)
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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H
ERSCHEL’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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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!”
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(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.”
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He sent Aunt Caroline what he called “a sketch of the 40 feet [telescope] … made without hands, by Photography.”
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Herschel read his first paper on photography to the Royal Society on March 14, 1839; in this paper he coined the name “photography,” to replace Talbot’s more vapid “photogenic drawing.” (He had already suggested the term to Talbot in February.)
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The paper also introduced the terms “positive” and “negative.” Later Herschel would be responsible for another crucial term in the new art, referring to taking a photograph “by a snap-shot.”
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Herschel withdrew the paper before publication, requesting that only an abstract be printed as a “note” in the society’s
Proceedings
. Herschel later explained that he had withdrawn the article because he did not wish to interfere with “Mr. Talbot’s just and long antecedent claims” for priority in inventing the process.
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In September Herschel made the first photograph on glass: an image of his father’s forty-foot telescope, which was pulled down two months later. By precipitating freshly formed silver chloride onto a piece of glass, a light-sensitive surface was made to adhere to it. Exposed through the lens in a camera, an image was formed, and fixed with a wash of the hyposulphite. The fixing of this negative was so perfect that half a century later his son, Alexander Stewart Herschel, was able to produce twenty-five paper prints from the original plate.
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By the 1850s, Herschel’s technique for taking photographs on glass negatives and printing paper copies—rather than Daguerre’s more cumbersome process—would be deployed by the French themselves, in documenting Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s complete renovation of Paris under Napoléon III.
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D
URING HIS EXPERIMENTS
, Herschel realized that the “hypo” needed to be used carefully; if overused, it deposited sulfur compounds into the photographs, spoiling some and weakening others. Hyposulphite of soda was expensive and difficult to obtain. Herschel wondered why plain water could not be used to wash out or fix the photographs. As he put it in the notebooks, “Why should it not—the nitrate is a [water] soluble salt?” He tried several times, but without good results. Finally Herschel
realized that the problem was the water quality. Slough was now becoming an urban area of London, with the problems of a big city—such as pollution. “I observe here that my pump water is now at least five fold more loaded with muriates than it was five or six years ago,” Herschel mused, “so much that it is quite unusable when silvery solutions are concerned.” He found that by using “snow-water,” which was purer, he could gain success. Some of his water-fixed photographs remain to this day. But he quickly realized that ensuring such purity of the water would not be commercially viable.
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Slough had become a popular place to live, thanks in part to the young Queen Victoria, who resided in nearby Windsor Castle. The Great Western Railway had knit together Slough and the center of London, making travel between them quick and easy. When the Italian astronomer Giovanni Amici had visited London in 1827, Herschel insisted that Amici stay at Herschel’s house at Slough, noting that the seventeen-mile trip to London would take “only” two and a half or three hours by coach. When Talbot made his trip to Slough in February 1839, he marveled that it had taken a mere thirty-eight minutes to arrive by train.
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Queen Victoria’s first train ride was from Slough to London, in 1842; the train averaged forty-four miles per hour. Victoria asked Albert to tell the railway company she had not enjoyed the trip at all, and to please go more slowly in the future.
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However, this increase in convenience to Slough brought changes that Herschel could not abide, especially after the idyllic time he had enjoyed at the Cape Colony. As he explained to his aunt, “Since the good old times the neighborhood is so changed that it seems we are already in another country. A railroad runs close to the village and brings down hundreds of idle people and all day the road in front of the house is kept in a riot and dust with the railroad omnibuses.”
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There was also another problem with living in Slough—a seventh child had been born soon after the Herschels’ return from the Cape, and the house at Slough was becoming too small. Herschel began to seek a more countrified place to live. In the summer of 1839 he found a house near the village of Hawkhurst in Kent, in a large park surrounded by hilly countryside, reminiscent in some ways of their beloved home in South Africa. In April of 1840 the family relocated to the new house, called Collingwood. It was a good idea to move, as the prolific couple would go on to have five more children, for a total of twelve.