International photographer (Jan-Dec 1934)

From Aristotle To Eastman A Vest Pocket History of Photography — Ideal If You Want to Deliver a Lecture on This Subject Sometime ^t/jJROBABLY people were in less of a hurry and m ™LMi Patience was less of a virtue back beyond 1850. But Miss Catherine Draper was no less a hero 3****a ine, therefore, when she posed for the first photograph made in America. There was no question of "Now hold still, please, just a moment!" Winsome Miss Draper had to remain rigid for ten long minutes while the bright sunlight reflected from her heavily powdered face made an impression on the plate. But at that time no one thought of photography as very much fun. It was scientific exploration into a new realm of knowledge, with little assurance of the course the future would take. That is why Miss Draper, the first photographer's model in America, merits some of the credit due a pioneer. She hadn't even the satisfaction of knowing that her beauty was going to be perpetuated by the process. But it was. The picture is still in existence and Miss Draper's charm remains. Back Twelve Centuries The first American photograph was made by Miss Draper's brother, a professor at New York University. As a photographic experimenter, he was one of a long line of men who contributed to the science of recording light images: a line which has extended all the way from Aristotle's observation of sunlight's effect on the green color of plants down to the minute exactitude of the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, New York, to which are credited such surprising discoveries as that a certain impurity in gelatine, amounting to no more than two or three drops in a ton of the photographic "emulsion" made from gelatine, is vitally important to film sensitivity. The romantic story more definitely begins with the discovery of silver chloride, a millenium or so after Aristotle. Sixteenth Century alchemists in their search for a means of transmuting base metals into gold observed and recorded that silver nitrate and other silver compounds were sensitive to light. Two more centuries passed, and the rudimentary science of photography began to leave the stage of fable and guesswork. A German named Schultze experimented in an orderly and scientific manner with this matter of the sensitivity of silver compounds to light ; and he actually obtained copies of writing on a sensitive surface of chalk and silver nitrate. So far this had been slow progress. No one seemed to have any idea how these discoveries could be used, or even that they could be used. But the wonder is rather that such a magical phenomenon as photography ever was evolved at all, rather that that its discovery took so long. The "Camera Obscura" In 1802 the progress of photographic invention gained some momentum in the hands of Thomas Wedgwood and Sir Humphrey Davy in England — and the reason was principally the age-old desire to save labor, as will come forth in ensuing paragraphs. Curiously enough, photography and photographic processes are still having that effect today in many industrial and scientific uses. At this stage it is necessary to refer back to the "camera obscura" — that means "dark room" — which had been long in existence at the time of Schultze's experimentation. This device with the Latin name was the principal sideshow attraction of its time — a dark room with a lens and prism at the top, through which came rays that cast a vivid picture of the scene outside the room on a table in the middle of the room. Small boys can still make toys illustrating the principle out of a box with a pinhole. No lens is needed if the hole is small enough. A similar but smaller arrangement, used to aid artists in drawing, was the forerunner of cameras as we know them — just as Schultze's crude reproduction of writing on light-sensitive material preceded film. The two lines, chemical and optical, came together in 1802, when Wedgwood tried to find a short cut to silhouette making by taking a shadowy camera picture on silver nitrate. His photographic experimentation was only partly successful, because the silver nitrate he used was not sensitive enough. But his work was taken up by one of the leading British scientists of the day, Sir Humphrey Davy, who got better pictures. Yet even he had to lament at the end of his work: "Nothing but a method of preventing the unshaded parts from being colored by exposure to the day is wanting to render this process as useful as it is elegant." There was still no way to keep the light which made the picture from destroying it afterward. The problem of "fixing" was not solved until 1839, when Sir John Herschel recommended to Daguerre his own discovery of twenty years earlier, sodium thiosulphate, since familiar to the photographic world as "hypo." Then, at last, pictures stayed as they had been taken. Daguerre With Daguerre, whose name we know from our grandmothers' quaint portraits, photography began in earnest. Louis Daguerre was a celebrated scene painter, and like many other artists of his day he used a camera obscura for sketching purposes. His reason for experimenting with photography was again the desire to save labor — to catch these camera images photographically rather than have to sketch them by hand. He formed a partnership with Joseph Nicephore Niepce, another Frenchman, whose interest in photography was to find a method of automatically copying designs upon lithographic stone. It was a Daguerreotype picture that was taken of Miss Draper; and a few years later every block on lower Broadway — where now the Wool worth building stands — which was then New York's fashionable shopping district, had at least one Daguerreotype shop. The sensitive surface for Daguerre's photographs was silver darkened by iodine fumes. Light reflected from objects in front of the camera entered the shutter, passed through the lens, struck the sensitive plate, and recorded a "latent image" corresponding to the light and dark areas of the scene in front of the camera. After the plate had been exposed in the camera it was held over a dish of gently warmed mercury. The mercury vapor clung to the parts of the plate where the light had acted. The silver iodide of the sensitive surface was then dissolved away by "hypo" just as (Turn to Page 28) Please mention The International Photographer when corresponding with advertisers.