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I. HISTORICAL
Among the earliest uses of photography were the scientific. In March 1840, nine months after the French government released the daguerreotype process to the world, Dr. John W. Draper took the first successful photograph of a celestial object — the moon. At the Harvard College Observatory, attempts were begun in 1848 to make daguerreotype, or talbotype, pictures of stars,2 with the first successful results obtained on the star Vega in July 1850. Professor S. F. B. Morse and others were active in this field at about the same time.
The antecedent techniques of motion picture photography developed by Muybridge,3 Eakins and others were for the study of animal and human locomotion.
Moser, in 1842, first observed radioactive effects on photographic emulsions. The fogging of silver chloride and iodide emulsions by uranium salts was rather thoroughly investigated by Niepce de SaintVictor in 1 867. The researches of
Becquerel, the Curies, Wilson and many others used photographic emulsions as instruments in nuclear research. Up to the invention of the Wilson cloud chamber, the emulsions used were those developed for visible spectrum photography. Today we have emulsions especially developed for nuclear studies, and, as a result, there has been a great revival in the use of nuclear photographic techniques. To date, some thirteen nuclear particles have been detected and identified through the use of these techniques.
The early efforts have been refined and extended in application, providing science with many specialties which depend in great measure on the photosensitive medium. Applications have become so widespread and diverse that, compared with the extent of the effort, relatively little has been done to coordinate this field.
II. DEFINITION
To aid in codification and unification of the field encompassing the scientific uses of photography, we need a term to describe it adequately. The term, photographic instrumentation, is proposed and defined as: The use of the photosensitive
medium for the detection, recording and/or measurement of scientific and engineering phenomena. Photographic instrumentation thus includes the apparatus, the techniques, the processes and the applications in scientific endeavors.
III. THE PRIOR STATE OF THE ART
The usefulness of photographic instrumentation has been expanded slowly since its earliest applications but it has received great impetus during the last two great wars. It is not the purpose of this paper to review all that has gone before; indeed, such would be a fabulously complex and difficult task which would take many years, a large staff and considerable funds to accomplish. That this is needed is seen most clearly in the almost daily appearance of new embodi
ments of old, discarded and essentially worthless devices and techniques.
A number of excellent abstract and digest publications,4"8 many of them founded over thirty years ago, have attempted to keep us abreast of doings in photographic instrumentation. But this field represents only a small part of the interest of these periodicals. It must be borne in mind that much of the information is in abstract form, requiring the reader to go to the original papers for
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November 1951 Journal of the SMPTE Vol. 57