Herschel, John
John Frederick William Herschel
In 1839, Daguerre applied for a patent for his invention. So did Talbot. But in that same year, an energetic and most prolific man came on the scene. His name was John Frederick William Herschel. If you were to ramble about in Westminster Abbey, as I have done, looking for the graves of famous scientists like Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton, you will encounter a tombstone with a Latin inscription. Fortunately, the abbey has been kind enough to provide translations. It reads:
John Herschel, of William Herschel the only son by birth, in work and in fame; having explored the Heavens, he rests here near Newton. ‘One generation shall laud thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.’ Psalm 145. 4-5. He lived 79 years, and died 11 May 1871.
John Herschel the Polymath
That hardly tells the story. He was an astronomer, botanist, chemist, mathematician, philosopher and photography tinkerer. He discovered that hyposulphite of soda, more often simply called hypo in the world of photography, could be used to fix pictures and make them permanent, a bit of information that he passed on to both Daguerre and Talbot. His wife recalls a visit by Talbot:
I happen to remember well the visit to Slough of Mr Fox Talbot, who came to show Herschel his beautiful little pictures of Ferns and Laces taken by his new process. - when something was said about the difficulty of fixing the pictures, Herschel said "Let me have this one for a few minutes" and after a short time he returned and gave the picture to Mr Fox Talbot saying "I think you'll find that fixed" - this was the beginning of the hyposulphite plan of fixing.
He wrote significant papers on photography in which he coined for the first time the word photography, negative and positive. He was the first to make use of glass plates for negatives when he photographed his telescope in September 1839.
Mathew Brady
During the American Civil War, using a process very much like one proposed by Herschel, Mathew Brady became the most famous photographer of the 19th century. He amassed a collection of photographic glass plates that numbered 10,000. Often unrealized is the fact that most of Brady’s photographs were not taken by Brady. He employed many photographers and purchased negatives from others. But when displayed or printed they all contained the obligatory caption, “Photograph by Brady.” It was a slight-of-hand. He provided the pictures. He was misunderstood.
It should not be thought that the invention of photography that brought it to its current state of development in 1898 rested mainly on the shoulders of Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot and Herschel. They stood on the shoulders of others who learned many things about chemistry. Wilhelm Homberg, is an example. In 1694 he explained how some chemicals darkened when exposed to light.
By 1898 photography was on the boundary between the old and the new. The old was large cameras with a front that held a lens, a back that held glass plates to be exposed, a bellows in between. The new was celluloid film developed in the 1880s and hand held cameras in the 1890s. In 1898, Kodak introduced a folding pocket camera.
The Photograph Idea Revisited
We need someone familiar with the idea of a camera such as the camera obscura, a precursor to the photographic camera. The camera obscura was well known in the medieval era. One sort of camera obscura was a box small enough to fit on a table. These types of cameras obscura were adapted for photography by the likes of Niépce, Daguerre, Talbot and Herschel. The other type of camera obscura is a large darkened room. You can easily experiment with one. Cover all the windows in a room with black paper so that it completely dark in the room. Then put a small hole in the paper covering one of the windows. The out-of-doors, if it is a bright enough day, will be projected onto a wall opposite the window. To improve on this camera, in place of the hole put a camera lens. Now imagine that you hang a cloth that has been treated with a photosensitive chemical opposite the hole or lens in your darkened room and that outside you hung the body of a crucified man in the sun. You should be able to create a photographic negative on the cloth.
Herschel Even a Better Choice
Herschel, however, is my favorite choice. Room sized cameras obscura were scattered about England in his lifetime, although they were a far cry from being able to produce life-sized images, as was the case in Leonardo’s days. They were a favorite amusement in public parks and at the beach. Hanging a crucifixion victim out in the sun for several days might have been a problem in merry old England of the time. But then, too, many strange things were done in those days in the name of science. As for opportunity, Herschel was a world traveler—he met up with his friend Charles Darwin in South Africa. Sir John Herschel, knight of the Royal Guelphic Order, a Fellow of the Royal Society, someone whom Charles Darwin called “one of our greatest philosophers,” would have certainly been welcome in Savoy’s royal palace. As for motive, we might be able to weave one, just as we might for Leonardo or Alhazen. Herschel was an English Christian in the middle of the 19th century—his grandfather was Jewish. It might well be supposed that in this time of turbulent Catholic revival in England—the Tractarians, the Newmanites and the Puseyites—that Herschel like many of his peers were prejudiced against the Roman Catholic Church.
Albedo Image
The most interesting tidbit in Adler’s words is this simple phrase: “this is an albedo image, it will fail a VP-8 test. . .” That, more than anything, is why the image was not created in some room sized camera.
The world albedo is not a word most of us use very often, if ever. It was coined by Johann Heinrich Lambert in 1760. Lambert was another genius. He was, like so many geniuses of a previous era, a man of many talents. He was an astronomer, a physicist, a mathematician and a philosopher. He suggested that our sun was part of a group of stars which moved together through the Milky Way, something that helped keep the astronomer Herschel busy when he was not making glass plates for cameras or discovering that hyposulphite of soda would fix photographs. Herschal was refining his father’s confirmation of what Lambert hypothesized.