Photography Invented

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Introduction
Among modem inventions, that of photography is one of the most valuable for varied usefulness, while few are more wonderful on the score of ingenuity. The steps of its later development have been universally observed and its new processes and applications popularly described as fast as they appeared. But not less important and scarcely less interesting, is the story of its beginnings and early advance through the labors of patient experimenters.

Photography— that is, the process of forming and fixing images of objects by the chemical action of light— was not at all understood before the nineteenth century. The effect of light upon various substances had been much earlier observed, as in the fading of dyed materials and the blackening of paper, etc., when moistened with silver solutions. But not till the close of the eighteenth century does anyone appear to have thought of applying the discovery of the changes of color produced by the action of light upon silver compounds to any practical purpose. The earliest experiments leading to photographic results occurred in connection with the camera-obscura, a chamber or box in which the image of an exterior object is projected upon a plane surface. From experiments with the camera-obscura, which was invented by Baptista Porta, an Italian philosopher, in the sixteenth century, the photographic camera was developed. It is a camera-obscura in miniature — a box having a lens at one end and a ground-glass screen at the other but now highly perfected and equipped.

The discovery of photography, properly so called, has been claimed for at least two men, who are said to have made it in the latter part of the eighteenth century — Professor Charles, a French physicist and Matthew Boulton, an English inventor and engineer, the partner of James Watt. In the case of Charles, the claim is regarded as merely traditional and the best authorities consider it too vague and improbable to be taken into serious account.” Boulton and Watt sold pictures that have been described as photographic but are now known to have been executed by a mechanical process with which photography had nothing to do.

Early in the nineteenth century the first definite progress in true photography was made and duly recorded. From this period to the full accomplishment of the results attained by Niepce and his more distinguished associate, Daguerre, the history of the art is clearly set forth in Harrison’s account.

This selection is by William Jerome Harrison.

Time: 1838
Place: France

With the dawn of the nineteenth century all things were propitious for the rapid advancement of matters scientific. Great progress had by this time been made both in chemistry and in optics; while the art of experimenting — the knowledge of how to question nature — had become familiar to many men of talent and education. Thomas Wedgwood, fourth son of the great potter, earnestly studied the action of light upon certain com pounds of silver. He was encouraged and assisted by Humphry Davy, then just rising into fame as a chemist and after Wedgwood’s death Davy wrote an account of their work, which appeared in the Journal of the Royal Institution for 1802.

Wedgwood’s best results were obtained by coating paper or white leather with a weak solution of silver nitrate. The more or less opaque object which it was desired to copy was then placed on the prepared surface and the whole exposed to sun light. In a few minutes the unprotected portions of the paper were darkened and when the opaque object was removed its form remained in white upon a black ground. Paintings on glass could be copied in this way, the light passing through the transparent and semitransparent portions and blackening the sensitive paper placed underneath. Wedgwood noticed that ” red rays, or the common sunbeams passed through red glass, have very little action upon paper prepared in this manner; yellow and green are more efficacious but blue and violet light produce the most decided and powerful effects. ”

These facts had been previously published by Scheele and by Senebier but Wedgwood does not appear to have known of their work. The scantiness of scientific literature at that time and the difficulty of communication between different countries were, indeed, great hinderances to progress. The workers in any one country were usually ignorant of what had been done elsewhere; so that the same track was pursued again and again and the same discoveries made several times over. Davy made some important additions to Wedgwood’s work. He found that the chloride was much more sensitive to light than the nitrate of silver. Both Wedgwood and Davy attempted to secure the pictures formed within a camera, upon paper coated with these salts of silver but without success. Davy, however, using the more concentrated light of the solar microscope, readily obtained images of small objects on paper prepared with silver chloride.

But there was another and more fatal objection to this method of “picturing by light,” which not even Davy, with all his chemical knowledge, was able to surmount. When the copies obtained were exposed to daylight, the same agency which had produced the picture proceeded to destroy it. The action of sunlight upon the white or lightly shaded portions constituting the picture speedily blackened the entire surface of the paper or leather, causing the whole to become of one uniform tint, in which nothing could be distinguished. To prevent this it was clearly necessary to remove the unacted-on silver salt after the image had been formed and before the paper was exposed, as a whole, to daylight. Long-continued washing in water was tried but proved ineffectual; nor was a coating of transparent varnish found of any service. Davy does not seem to have pursued the process with much energy and the whole thing dropped into obscurity. Still he clearly recognized its capabilities, for he writes: “Nothing but a method of preventing the unshaded parts of the delineations from being colored by exposure to the day is wanting to render this process as useful as it is elegant.” In this copying process, devised by Wedgwood and improved by Davy, we see the germ of the ordinary method by which our negative photographs on glass are made to yield a positive proof or impression upon sensitized paper.

The first man to obtain a permanent photograph was Joseph Nic6phore Niepce, who was born at Chalons-sur-Sa6ne, March 7, 1765. He was well educated and designed for the Church but the outbreak of the French Revolution upset all plans and in 1794 Niepce fought in the ranks of the Republican army which invaded Italy. Ill health soon compelled his retirement from active service and marrying, he settled down at Chalons; his brother Claude, to whom he was devotedly attached, residing with him.

Even during childhood, the fondness of the brothers Niepce for scientific pursuits had been very noticeable and they now applied themselves to the task of invention, bringing out a machine called the pyrelophore, which propelled vessels by the aid of hot air; and a velocipede, the ancestor of our modern bicycle. Endeavoring to bring these inventions before the public, Claude went to Paris in 1811 and afterward crossed over to England, where he settled down at Kew.

It was, apparently, about the year 1813 that Nicephore Niepce began the experiments which resulted in his discovery of what may be called the bitumen process in photography. From his correspondence with his brother Claude, we learn something of this method; and when, in 1827, Nicephore visited his brother at Kew, he brought with him many specimens of his work. These pictures, the first permanent photographs ever produced, Niepce desired to bring before the notice of the Royal Society but , as he declined to publish the process by which they were produced (being desirous to perfect it before making it public), the rules of the society compelled them to refuse Niepce’s communication, Having examined several of the specimens presented by this early French experimenter to his English friends, we can testify to the successful manner in which he had copied engravings.

Continued.

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