Chapter 37: Photography
In 1839, inventors in England and France simultaneously introduced the world to photography, putting “a new force in the hands of man.” We’ll learn about the scientists who made it possible, the initial experiments, and the impact it has had from the 19th Century to today.
Sources for this episode include:
Boggs, Jordan. "A History of Photography and How It Shaped the World." Light Stalking. 2019. https://www.lightstalking.com/history-of-photography
Buerger, Janet E. French Daguerreotypes. University of Chicago Press. 1989.
"Nicéphore Niépce: French Inventor." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated Dec 11, 2009. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicephore-Niepce
"Louis Daguerre: French Painter and Physicist." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated Nov 14, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Louis-Daguerre
Snelling, Henry H. The History and Practice of the Art of Photography; or the Production of Pictures Through the Agency of Light. G.P. Putnam. 1849.
"William Henry Fox Talbot: British Chemist, Linguist, and Photographer." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated Mar 09, 2011. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Henry-Fox-Talbot
Reminder: Footnotes for the transcript are available to Patreon supporters. To become one, go to Patreon.com/indrevpod to sign up.
Okay, so if you listen to this podcast, you’re interested in modern history. Maybe not, like, super-modern history, but at the very least the so-called “modern period.”
But if you’re also into Medieval history, one of the aspects of it you might be interested in is heraldry and (in particular) armory. That’s the system of the coats of arms you sometimes see. Kings and queens have them, nobles have them. Heck, many of you listening probably have some family lineage that has a coat of arms attached to it.
But why? Was it just vanity, or did having a coat of arms serve some useful purpose?
Well, imagine you were a knight, about to go into battle. The king rides up to give an inspiring speech. But unless you were quite the accomplished knight, you might not recognize the king.
It’s so difficult for us to conceive of this. I mean, we all know what Queen Elizabeth II looks like, right? Just like we all know what Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks like, and President Donald Trump, and Angela Merkel and Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and so on.
We even know, more or less, what the old kings and queens of Europe looked like. There were paintings made of them, after all.
But in the Middle Ages, most people wouldn’t have access to a painting of their sovereign, to say nothing of all the other dukes and lords and knights and archbishops and whatnot. The only image of the king you’d have seen would probably be a crude profile of him on a coin. And if you could look up at someone and say, “Hey, aren’t you the guy from this coin? Are you the king?” – well, that would be pretty impressive.
The coat of arms – with its particular colors, patterns, and drawings – was the way a person of significance could be recognized.
And I think you know where I’m going with this: The reason why we don’t rely on heraldry anymore. The reason why we know what our political leaders look like – the topic of today’s episode – photography.
As you’ll remember from Chapter 16, Sir Humphry Davy wrote an 1802 account of “a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver...” Thomas Wedgwood – the son of our old friend, the pottery factory mogul Josiah Wedgwood – had figured out a process for using these light-sensitive chemicals to capture silhouette images on paper.
Now, the idea of using light to affect chemicals – especially silver nitrate – had been around for ages. In 1614, an Italian chemist named Angelo Sala wrote how “When you expose powdered silver nitrate to sunlight, it turns black as ink.”
In 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze carried out an experiment in Germany in which he put a stencil on a bottle, and then put a silver nitrate mixture in the stencil. He then applied it to sunlight, the chemical mixture turned dark, and writing appeared on the bottle.
Also going back ages was something called a “camera obscura”. Latin for “dark room” the camera obscura phenomenon happens when light passes through a small pinhole – it creates an inverted image.
So, let’s say you’re in a dark room, with your back to one wall, facing another wall. On the wall behind you is a pinhole. On the other side of the pinhole is the outside, on a bright day. Standing outside is me. What happens is the light will pass through the pinhole and project onto the opposite wall in the dark room – the wall you are facing. You’ll be able to see my face, upside down, on that wall.
During the Enlightenment, several individuals came up with ways to improve the camera obscura. You could replace the pinhole with a lens. You could add a mirror, so the reproduced image would no longer be inverted. You could make it smaller too – less of a room and more of a box – and see the reproduced image from the outside.
Thomas Wedgwood, it seems, was the first to conceive of using silver nitrate and a camera obscura to capture these reproduced images as photographs. But the experiments were pretty much failures. He couldn’t figure out how to make the different features of an image copied with the right intensity. Unbeknownst to him, Wedgwood was using the wrong materials and exposing negatives to too much light.
If he had longer to experiment, he may have fixed these problems, but since childhood he had always been in frail health. In fact, the reason he met Davy was a stay at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, where he tried the experimental medical treatments they provided. But it didn’t work. He died in 1805, at the age of 34.
But where Thomas Wedgwood failed, others would succeed. And by the end of the First Industrial Revolution, several scientists had figured out solutions to the problems Wedgwood encountered. And they began producing the first true photographs.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 37: Photography
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One note before we get started, I want to thank all of our Patreon supporters today, including Walter Torres, John Bartlett, Brian Long, and new patrons Eric Hogensen and Brandon Stansbury. Thank you all for your ongoing support.
So, Thomas Wedgwood may have invented photography (more or less) in Britain, but the first successful experiments with photography came out of France.
Among the early French experimenters in photography may have been our old friend, Jacques Alexandre César Charles, one of the hot air balloonists from Chapter 25. While he never documented his work, it is believed that he demonstrated a process for capturing silhouettes on light-sensitive paper at the Louvre around 1801.
But the guy who really got the ball rolling was an inventor named Nicéphore Niépce.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was born in in Saône-et-Loire in 1765. His father was a lawyer and the well-off family was suspected of royalist sympathies during the French Revolution. Niépce became a professor after completing his studies in Angers, then for a while served in the army under Napoleon. He returned to civilian life in 1801, becoming something of a gentleman-farmer and Renaissance Man, working on various scientific experiments. Among other things, Niépce and his brother invented the first workable internal combustion engine, new water pumps, and an early version of a bicycle.
But his most important work – the crux of his legacy – was in photography. As early as 1816, Niépce had figured out how to capture small images on paper using a camera obscura. The paper, coated with silver chloride, produced a negative (dark where it should have been light, light where it should have been dark), overall a rather impressive result.
He continued experimenting and developed a process he called “heliography.” He would dissolve Bitumen of Judea in lavender oil, then lightly coat that substance on a slab of stone, sheet metal, or glass. Then an engraving could be placed over the slab surface and exposed to sunlight. After some time in the sun, the engraving would be removed, and the solvent would be washed away. What remained was the hardened bitumen, which could be used for creating prints on paper.
A couple of these sun prints still survive today. One is a reproduced version of an old Flemish engraving of a boy with a horse. Another is of a woman with a spinning wheel.
And had he left it there, it still probably would have been a significant invention, as a means of mass-producing printed images. But he also took it a step further. Around 1826 or 1827, he used a camera obscura to capture an image on a pewter sheet, coated in his bitumen solution. Placing the camera in his upstairs window, the image captured was the scene of his neighborhood, including walls and a roof of adjacent buildings, and a field in the distance.
This image – the “View from the Window at Le Gras” – is generally recognized as the first-ever photograph. And you can see it this week on social media by following @IndRevPod on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. That’s @ I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D.
Now, despite being the first photograph, this process did not make modern photography viable. For one thing, the “View from the Window at Le Gras” took several hours to produce. Nothing like the quick snaps to take a photo we know today. In fact, Niépce never would make the process viable. But in 1829, he partnered with an artist to carry out additional photography experiments – and that artist would make the dream photography (as we know it) a reality.
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was born in Val-d'Oise in 1787. After working for some time as a revenue officer, Daguerre began a career as a painter, specifically in set design for operas. In 1822, he opened the “Diorama” in Paris – an exhibition of pictorial views, with various effects induced by changes in the lighting.
Apparently, this work caught the attention of Niépce, who reached out to him to form a partnership. Daguerre agreed, and for about four years the two men worked together to improve on the technology.
Then, in 1833, Niépce died before he could see any practical improvements come to fruition. But in those four years, he had successfully passed the torch to Daguerre – presumably teaching the painter his secret process of heliography.
Daguerre continued experimenting. And at some point – like Sala and Schulze and Wedgwood had – he realized silver nitrate was a really useful chemical for capturing the effect of light. Using an iodized silver plate in a camera, and exposing it to the light, he could capture photographs like Niépce. But this process still took hours. At some point, however, he realized he could take a faintly-developed image and expose it to vaporized mercury and finish with common salt. This chemical process significantly sped up the time needed for creating a photographic image. Instead of several hours, it took only 20 minutes or so.
In 1837, Daguerre took one of the first photographs using this process. It features a shelf with several plaster casts sitting on it, including a couple with cherub faces. On the wall next to the shelf hangs a small painting and a wicker wine jug.
The next year, Daguerre took a new photograph. Like Niépce’s, it was taken from an upstairs window, this one overlooking a street in Paris. This “View of the Boulevard du Temple” is much clearer than the “View from the Window at Le Gras”. But none of the traffic in the street is visible, since it moved a lot faster than photo took to create. Yet, in the lower-right corner, you can see two figures – one man giving another man a shoeshine. They had been there long enough to show up in the final image. We don’t know their names, but it is believed they were the first-ever photographed people.
In 1839, Daguerre launched a publicity campaign. He released a manual, outlining the process he developed for creating a Daguerreotype (the word he used for these photographs), while a politically-connected scientist friend named François Arago announced the breakthrough to a joint meeting of the French Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts. Arago subsequently arranged for the French government to buy the rights to this invention – and give it to the world for free – in exchange for lifetime pensions to Daguerre and Niépce’s son, Isidore.
And the invention spread like wildfire. Just a couple months later – all the way over in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – a lamp-manufacturer and chemistry hobbyist named Robert Cornelius took perhaps the first-ever selfie. Dozens of portrait photos followed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Throughout the 1840s, millions of Daguerreotypes were produced in France and across the world. And they produced a flurry of both positive and negative reactions for a public mystified and enthralled by the breakthrough. As the atomic chemist Jean Baptiste Dumas wrote to Daguerre, “It strikes me as one of the most happy and fertile inventions of genius...You have put a new force in the hands of man...a new agent destined to produce an incalculable evolution in the art of imitation.”
But little did Daguerre know, at the time, another inventor was putting the finishing touches on his own long-developed photographic process up in England.
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William Henry Fox Talbot was born into an aristocratic family Dorset in 1800. A quite successful student at Cambridge, Talbot was something of a polymath scholar, contributing to the fields of linguistics, the classics, mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry. He soon became a member of the Royal Society and, in the 1830s, he briefly served as a Member of Parliament.
Then in 1835, he published an article announcing a new discovery. Bathing a piece of paper in a solution of common salt and then coating one side with a strong solution of silver nitrate, he produced a silver chloride, making the paper very light-sensitive. From there he could use a camera to create a photographic negative. That same year, he took perhaps the longest-surviving photo negative. It was of a latticed window in his father’s hometown at Lacock Abbey.
So, in 1839, when he learned of Daguerre’s great invention, Talbot scrambled. He argued that he was the real inventor of the photograph and quickly presented his work to the Royal Institution just days after Arago’s presentation in Paris. And in particular, he presented several photographs he took which predated the Daguerreotype. He called his the “calotype.”
It soon became apparent that the Daguerreotype and calotype were two very different means of achieving the same ends. The Daguerreotype used a camera obscura to produce an image on a metal plate, and a mirror-image of that plate could be turned into a photograph. The calotype used a camera obscura to produce a negative image on paper, and then – by essentially using the same process again – could be turned into a positive photograph.
Talbot estimated that he spent about £5,000 over the years developing the calotype – nearly $670,000 in modern terms – and he wanted to make it worthwhile. So, after patenting his process, he developed a very aggressive licensing scheme which hardly made it worth it to consumers (especially with the Daguerreotype available as an alternative). But eventually, photographers realized the true value the calotype held over the Daguerreotype. The same negative could be used over and over to produce huge quantities of positives. Photographs could be mass-produced.
The technology used in photography continued to improve in the 1850s and onward. And as it did, it had a tremendous impact on the way we see the world.
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While I was in Japan, I visited a number of ancient Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, and – like a good tourist – I took a lot of photos. But when ceremonies were happening at these places, photography was forbidden. In fact, in Kyoto, I saw a very special Shinto ceremony with musicians and a dancer holding a small tree branch, with everyone wearing traditional clothing. Several people in the crowd just couldn’t help themselves and got out their cameras. But when they did, a security guard would hold up a long stick with a “no photography” sign at the end of it and stick it out into the crowd at the person with the camera.
Why?
I mean, we know why. There’s a sense that photography cheapens the holiness of the ceremony – like it’s just another tourist attraction, rather than a sacred practice.
But why?
I think we, as humans, have a relationship with photography that’s more peculiar than our relationships with other inventions. It’s like we’re looking at ourselves in the mirror. But not just looking at ourselves in the mirror – it challenges our views of ourselves, our memories of ourselves, our estimations of ourselves as individuals and as nations. Human memory is pretty terrible, and we’re all predisposed to remembering ourselves as the heroes in the narrative stories that are our memories. It’s tougher to do that if we’ve committed atrocities. Possessing the photographic evidence of, say, slavery or the Holocaust puts our history in a different perspective.
If you take Yuval Noah Harari’s view that humanism is a new, almost-universal religion, I think it’s fair to say that photography is a major reason for its success.
By the 1840s, as photography was spreading, the first photojournalists popped onto the scene, documenting the Mexican-American War and the Second Anglo-Sikh War. In the 1850s, the photographers Roger Fenton, James Robertson, and Felice Beato documented the Crimean War for the British newspapers. For the first time, the public began seeing evidence of battlefield destruction and – in the Indian Rebellion of 1858 – started seeing images of dead soldiers. Similar developments came in the U.S. Civil War, when photographers captured images of generals and ordinary soldiers alike in portraits, the terrors and glories of the battlefields, and the shocking misery of war hospitals.
Photographs were made of famous individuals too. King Louis Philippe of France was photographed in 1842. Queen Victoria of Great Britain in 1844. James Polk became the first sitting U.S. President to be photographed in 1849.
By the 1850s, photographers were also taking pictures of the technological progress around them. In addition to portraits of Crimean War heroes and beautiful landscapes, the pioneering British photographer Robert Howlett also captured photos of the massive SS Great Eastern and its builder, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. (Shout out chapter 34!) The world’s first working railway suspension bridge, from the U.S. to Canada at Niagara Falls, was photographed in 1859 as a train moved along it. That photo is credited with changing Europeans’ views of North America – from those of a primitive, undeveloped landmass, to those of rising industrial powers.
And the ability to mass-produce images that way means we’re all more familiar with our greater world – and indeed universe – than we would have been before.
Think of some of the iconic photos we’ve all seen:
The Wright Brothers launching the first airplane at Kittyhawk
The shocking conditions of New York City tenement housing, documented by Jacob Riis
Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City
The Hindenburg Disaster
The “migrant mother” in rural California, during the Great Depression
“Tank Man” the day after the Tiananmen Square massacre
11 construction workers eating lunch on a beam, hundreds of feet in the air, during their break while building a skyscraper
Brandi Chastain taking off her jersey top after scoring the winning penalty kick in the 1999 Women’s World Cup
The monk Thich Quang Duc setting himself on fire in the streets of Saigon
And, of course, “Earthrise”
I think it goes without saying, even without too much explanation, that these images have had a profound influence on how we view the world we inhabit. They’ve shattered our illusions of human limitations; and challenged our views on human rights, the roles of women, and more.
But on a more basic level, photography has provided each and every one of us the means to document our own lives. Before photography, you’d need to pay a painter a lot of money to capture your likeness in a portrait for posterity. But with the flash of a camera, you no longer need to be rich and powerful. Anyone can get their image made, look back on it later in life, and pass the memories on to their descendants.
As Don Draper put it when pitching Kodak in an early episode of “Mad Men”…
“It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
And while he is very much a fictional character, Don Draper conveniently leads me to our next topic – the means with which the increasingly industrial world began selling the goods it was producing en masse – advertising: next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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