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254 E. EPSTEAN [j. s. M. p. E.
appropriate, because January 7, 1939, marks the Centenary of the day when the French scientist, Arago, member of the Chamber of Deputies and of the Academy of Sciences, communicated the first news of this new discovery to the members of the Academy. After a few months of necessary political procedure, the French Government, through Arago, published the details of the process — not of photography, but of the daguerreotype.
To give a full history of what today is called photography with its background, development, and innumerable applications would require many volumes. The word photography, from its derivation, implies primarily a study of light, and early in Genesis the word is mentioned in its very first verses. Ever since, philosophy and science have attempted without success to define and explain Light. Dr. Woodbridge, of Columbia University, writes in his chapter on the subject that: "it is a paradox" and it probably will remain so, in saecula saeculorum. We know little of its action and you will easily understand my meaning when I call your attention to the use of the phrase: "seeing the sun, the moon, the stars." What we see, of course, is only the radiation of their light and not its source. Distance, time and space, its brilliancy, and its movement, our imperfect optical apparatus — all make it impossible to see that essence which we include in the term "the light." I have read that stars which have been extinct for 400 years still impress our vision with their light.
Resuming our study of photography we find the camera obscura. Some historians have tried to trace its origin to the Arabs. Astrologers were attached to the courts of their rulers, whose lives, fortunes, and wars were influenced by the astrological studies of the planets, based on the day and hour of the ruler's birth. In order to study them apart from the myriads of other stars surrounding them, the seers built observation huts where no light could enter save through a hole in the roof of the "dark room."
Leonardo da Vinci in his notes on optics states : "... if the front of a building . . . which is illuminated by the sun has a dwelling over against it, and in that part of the front which does not face the sun you make a small round hole, all the objects which are lighted by the sun will transmit their images through this hole, and will be visible inside the dwelling on the opposite wall which should be made white. And they will be there exactly but inverted; and if in different parts of the same wall you make similar holes you will produce the same effect in each." And thus we have "light" writing through a so-called