Part 2

In the year 1824 we hear of another Frenchman (now, remember this was a long while ago, in 1819, and we had no photographs yet, although you might call that a photograph (exhibiting the fern picture) yet it is not). In the year 1824 we hear of another Frenchman who was a scene-painter at a theatre in Paris, and he had been using the camera obscura to obtain pictures from nature from which to paint his scenery. That is to say he had a tent built something like that (drawing figure on blackboard) with a lens something like that that was part of a right angled prism, and this light coming from the view, the image was formed in here and spread out upon a table from which he could make a drawing. He used that and was much annoyed at the time it took to get those pictures. He was very impatient, like a great many other Frenchmen. He conceived the idea of “fixing these pictures” as he called them. He did not want to have the trouble of drawing them. He said: “If I could only find some way of getting that fixed on the surface without the trouble of drawing it it would be a great convenience.” This Frenchman was Louis Daguerre, really the father of photography. Now he worked independently for some time, when he met Niepse, the Niepse that had been working on bitumen and oil of lavender, and they formed a kind of partnership in 1829. Now, remember, 1819 was the time that Sir John Herschel had discovered hypophosphite of sodium and its action on these silver compounds. They formed a partnership in order to work out “scene pictures” as they called them. In the year 1833 Niepse died--got tired of the work pretty much, I suppose--and Daguerre continued the work. What his early experiments were we have very doubtful records of. Daguerre did not seem to keep very good records. In the year 1839, little more than fifty years ago, he communicated to the French government a method for making pictures in the camera upon metallic plates. In other words he divulged the secret of the first photographic picture we have--the daguerreotype. This was such a great success and such a wonderful discovery that the French government pensioned Daguerre for his life time, and by an agreement with them the process became public property on August 10th, 1839. Now I have the good fortune to have here to-night the daguerreotype apparatus. This is practically all the paraphernalia of the daguerreotype. First of all was the camera (and you must pardon the condition of it as it is almost forty years old). I know of no other complete set in the United States, so this is rather a relic, and it requires a good deal of care in handling it for it almost falls to pieces (showing the apparatus). Here is where the lens was put and in here is where the plate holder was put. They first had to fix the lenses in the ordinary way with ground glass. Then they had a plate-holder something like ours, that they put the metallic plate in. Now having fixed it, the next thing to do was to present to the sitter this metallic plate, and I have here one of just such plates. Now, into this plate-holder are fitted “kits” as we call them to hold different sized plates. Unfortunately part of this apparatus is lost; _i.e._, to say all these little details of kits, but they could all be made out of little pieces of wood. Now, the daguerreotype is this: They take a silver-copper plate (a piece of copper plated with silver. When they first did this, they used to solder upon copper plates a piece of silver, then put it in a press and roll it out. After that time, in latter years when the galvanic battery had been discovered and was in common use, they electroplated it). Now, this particular plate was put into a holder that was held like that. Now the small boy was given one of the buffers or he was put at a wheel that had upon it a backing of felt and on the front of it was chamois leather (it is now long gone on this one--been rubbed off). This plate was then rubbed with a great deal of dexterity and you had to be very careful that you did not scratch it. That was the most important thing about them. It spoilt the picture if you scratched them. They had to be perfectly smooth. As I said, this was sometimes done by holding the plate on a wheel, but the ordinary way was by using one of these buffers. The silver plate was taken out by undoing this screw at the corner. Now, the first thing to do with it, then, is to make it sensitive. It is merely a silver surface now. It was made sensitive by placing it in one of these boxes (showing it) called coating boxes. Now that plate was put into that box (showing the same box), and see there is the lime in the box and it is now probably forty years old, having never been disturbed. In that lime was placed bromine, and it was then covered with a glass cover that fits over this glass trough or dish--it is rather deep. This was then placed with a little pressure--in order to keep the box tight and not let the bromine fumes get all over the studio--and they put the plate in here and pulled this over, so, leaving it there a certain number of minutes, and by action of the bromine vapor it becomes coated with bromide of silver. Then they either put some iodine into this same box or they had an iodine box. After the plate was in there a few minutes, they took it out and put it in there and gave it a dose of bromine. It was found, and by whom I am not sure, that the addition of a little iodine or a small proportion of iodide of silver with iodine of silver gave better effects. So it was then taken out and it was sensitive to light. Now, Daguerre discovered all that. This was then put in the plate holder and exposed in the camera and he got a picture. And it bothered him a great deal, for it faded. If he put that hypophosphite of sodium on it that our friend Herschel discovered, it cleaned the whole picture off. There was not enough of it. So he watched and watched and was weary with making these pictures and having them fade, until he went one day to a closet where he had a lot of these pictures stored, and he was delighted to see that the picture of a certain monument (I think it was) that he had made he thought on that plate some time before, and it was a good picture and a permanent picture. How it came about puzzled him a great deal. In looking around the closet where these pictures were exposed--where these plates were stored--he found that for some reason or other the bottle of mercury had been broken, and he tried almost every imaginable material in the closet, and at last it struck him it might be mercury. Well, he put some mercury on the plate and he ruined it. “Well, no,” he says, “it is not mercury but mercury in a very fine state. I wonder if it is the _Vapor of Mercury_?” He tried it and found that it was. That led to the development of the daguerreotype. Then all he did with a plate was to put it into a vessel with a few drops of mercury, and underneath a little spirit lamp. Then he would put the plate in and watch the heat (some now have a thermometer) and he would just pick it up every once in a while to see how it is developing. That process gave to him the first picture, the daguerreotype, and those are to-day the handsomest pictures ever made by photography. I have two or three of them which are partly spoiled, but to-day they far surpass anything we have ever since done in the science of photography. After the mercury process, it was very easy to wash the plate off. The object of the development was this: that where the light had acted there the mercury seemed to take hold and bring out the picture. Where the light had not acted you could dissolve the silver surface off with cyanide of potassium, which was generally used. But, if you will look at this old-fashioned daguerreotype, you will see that you had to look at them in a certain light; otherwise, you could see nothing.

Sometime afterwards a man named Fitsherbert, a Frenchman, conceived the idea of changing this peculiar picture in silver plate into a gold picture. In other words, he put into the plate a little chloride of gold and produced a daguerreotype which can be seen pretty clearly by looking squarely at it.

The beginning of the daguerreotype flourished only a short time. While Daguerre and others were working at the daguerreotype, Fox Talbot, a rich Englishman, took up the subject from another point of view. He conceived the idea of making a negative. Of course, every picture you took by Daguerre’s method you had to make a sitting for it. Such are the pictures up in the School of Mines of William Lloyd Garrison and Daniel Webster. They had to sit right down in front of the box, and copies could not be had. That was the trouble with the daguerreotype. You had one picture for every sitting. To make the difference between the positive and negative more clear, I have brought here to show you to-night (producing them) some positives and negatives printed on the same piece of paper. When the picture comes out of the camera and the plate is developing (exhibiting it) that is what it looks like--where the light struck all the light parts of the picture are black, and where the light did not strike all the black parts of the picture are white. If I take the same surface, containing the bromide of silver, iodide of silver or chloride of silver, and place it underneath that and expose it to the sunlight, where the light strikes through it will produce black, just as in the original object, and when I get through I get the positive. So there is a negative and there is a positive from the same picture. Now, that was Fox Talbot’s idea. He says “If I can do that, I can make pictures _ad libitum_.” With this object in view he coated paper with silver chloride. He exposed it then in the camera, fixed it in a solution of salt--common salt or iodide of potassium--and when he got through the picture was a permanent one, because the iodide of potassium dissolved out the white parts that were not affected by the light. From this negative he obtained other prints.

Now, various modifications of Fox Talbot’s process, were brought out, and a man named LaGray, I think (or at least it was just about the time he lived) conceived the idea of making these pictures more transparent by waxing them. That was the first good negative we had. It was a modification of Fox Talbot’s idea, only he waxed the paper. Then about the same time it was found that a mixture of chloride of iron and cyanide of potassium, when mixed together were acted upon by light. Herschel discovered this, and that was the way we obtained the blue print, which is far older than the photograph. Sir John Herschel found that a mixture of chloride of iron and cyanide of potassium, when exposed to sunlight made Prussian blue. So that if you take paper and coat it with this mixture and then expose it under a negative you get a blue picture.

The trouble with these paper pictures was that you could not eliminate the grain of the paper, and if you will examine these close enough you will see that they are blurred. This one printed from that particular negative is blurred--very much blurred. These sensitive silver compounds are so sensitive that the grain of the paper produces an impression. Now, in 1848, Niepse, a nephew of the first Niepse, thought it would be a good idea to use glass plates coated with albumen. He took chloride or iodide of silver, mixed it with white of egg, spread it on plates, heated the plates, which, of course, coagulated the albumen, and that fixed his film upon the glass plates. That was quite a step. Now, we had gotten rid of the paper. By the way, I made a little mistake there about the way he got the picture. He got the picture by putting salt in the albumen and then coagulating it, and then he dipped the plate into a solution of silver nitrate and in that way got the precipitate in the film itself. This was important but troublesome and not always successful.

Now, a few years before another discovery was made. Remember that this was in 1848 that Niepse worked with the albumen process. In 1840, Schurben, a Swiss chemist, discovered gum cotton. This gum cotton is a nitrated compound of cotton, made by the action of concentrated sulphuric and nitric acids upon cotton. Sometime afterwards Maynard, a Yankee, in Boston, discovered that this gum cotton was soluble in alcohol, and ether, and then he found that by evaporating the substance he got the thin film of collodion. Scott Archer, an Englishman, conceived the idea of using this film as a vehicle for these particularly sensitive silver salts for photographing. His method was pretty much that which is followed to-day and that is still in use to quite a large extent.

In this process we have this series of operations: First, the plate must be perfectly clean. That is essential. Any little spot upon it will form a nucleus which will spread over the surface of the plate. The plate is then coated with albumen and allowed to dry without heating. It is then flowed with this collodion, and in the collodion is put the chloride, iodide or bromide of silver, which you need. It is generally the chloride, iodide or bromide of silver. This collodion is afterwards dipped into a silver bath, and then we get the sensitized silver surface, very thin and perfectly transparent. It is then ready to go into the camera. It is put into the camera soaking wet with nitrate of silver. It is exposed and then developed with a solution of sulphate of iron with some acetic acid. After it is developed, the developer is washed off, fixed with hypophosphite of sodium, dried, varnished and we get the negative.

Now, the curious part about this wet plate process is that it is slow. The compounds are not very sensitive compared with the modern compounds. In the second place it is essential to use it wet. If you took the plate out of the silver bath where you sensitized it and washed off the nitrate of silver adhering to it and put the plate in the camera you would not get a picture. The silver nitrate is essential to the production of the picture. It acts in this way: Where the light has acted upon the sensitive silver compounds and you proceed to develop the picture, when you mix the sulphate of iron and pour the developer upon the plate, as the iron comes in contact with the nitrate of silver, with which the plate is wet, it produces metallic silver, which adheres to those parts of the picture which have been acted upon by the light. That seems to be the philosophy, because if you wash the nitrate off you cannot develop a picture upon such a plate.

Now, this process of photography revolutionized the daguerreotype, revolutionized photography and the daguerreotype became obsolete. I think it displaced the daguerreotype in three years. This process was such an advantage--collodion was such a nice substance to work with--that it revolutionized the photography of those days, and the daguerreotype fell out of existence.

Now, when you take into consideration the time that people had to sit for their pictures--five or six minutes--you can conceive how hard it was to keep still. They had such queer contrivances to keep the head straight, they screwed you up in various positions, and this was particularly exasperating where they had to take pictures requiring a good deal of time. Dr. Draper, who took some of these daguerreotypes, and who I believe was the first photographer of these pictures, desired to take a photo of his estimable lady. His studio was in the old University Building in Washington Square. I believe Mrs. Draper had to sit twenty minutes for that picture. In order to produce the best effect he had a tank made in the top of the laboratory so as to produce a blue light. Mrs. Draper was very patient while he was at work with this, and unfortunately, Dr. Colton tells me, the result was two pictures on the same plate. I should think it would. That was the first effort ever made to take the human face with the daguerreotype. Of course, with all that paraphernalia, with that slowness of action, anything that worked within a minute was considered wonderful, and that was practically what happened when Scott Archer discovered collodion.

This wet plate process continued from 1851 to 1871, about twenty years. I have the pleasure of showing you an amateur outfit for this process, used in 1860 to take to the Rocky Mountains (exhibiting it). That is an amateur outfit carried over the Rocky Mountains in 1860 to take pictures. Here is the old tank that carried the water. Here are some of the bottles of chemicals, and the way it was managed was this: This was hooked up, on the end of these sticks. This was the black cloth used as the developing room by the operator. Here is a little window with yellow glass to develop the pictures. The plates and bromide of silver was carried in these two boxes. That was carried on top of the mule and the boxes on the sides of the mule, so that he had a pretty good mule.

Now, to-day we do the same work with that apparatus (exhibiting apparently a Kodak), and a great deal better work it is.

In 1871 a more important revolution took place even than the wet plate process or the daguerreotype. Many efforts had been made to overcome the use of the wet plate--the plate wet with nitrate of silver, and some of the efforts were very successful but usually troublesome. The plate was kept moist in a variety of ways: by honey, by tea, by infusion of tea, by beer, by coffee, and a multitude of all the funniest concoctions you could think of, but the process was destined to fail.

In about 1870 it was conceived that you could make an emulsion of these peculiar compounds of silver--these sensitive silver compounds--that you could make an emulsion that you could pour upon the plate and produce a picture just when you pleased, and it was found that by mixing the chloride that produces the sensitive material in one portion of your collodion and putting nitrate of silver into another portion of the collodion, in certain proportions, you could produce a collodial emulsion. They had to be mixed in just exactly the right proportions, so as not to have an excess of nitrate of silver or an excess of bromide.

But that process failed and only lasted a few years; although I have here one of the plate holders used by such a process.

This was between the time of the wet plate process and the modern dry plate, when they used collodial bromide emulsion. It was a kind of a compromise between the wet plate and the dry plate. In 1871, Dr. R. L. Maddox, of Bath, England, had the idea that he would use gelatine, instead of albumen or collodion, as a vehicle to hold these silver salts upon the glass surface, and he found, among other things, something that surprised him--that when he put the silver salts in to contact with this gelatine they became wonderfully more sensitive than ever before.

The idea is this: That you make a gelatine mixture of a certain strength--the proportions required a certain amount of soft gelatine and a certain amount of hard gelatine. Into that gelatine you pour, with constant stirring; you pour a mixture at the same time--some particular bromide, generally bromide of potassium and nitrate of silver--in a very thin stream and keep it thoroughly stirred up. If you go too fast, you will not get the right result; but the result is, when you get through and do it right, you get a beautiful milky fluid, and that fluid contains bromide of silver in a wonderful state of suspension--very thin--and it remains suspended in this fluid. Now let that set--this cream or “emulsion,” as they call it--and you have as a result iodide of silver and iodide of potassium. You let the emulsion set and it produces a jelly, that jelly is then cut up into shreds, rubbed through a sieve or something of that kind to make it thoroughly divided, and washed thoroughly with water. Having done that it can be melted, and if you melt it and heat it to a certain temperature, there does not seem to be any limit to the sensitiveness of the material. If you use it cold it requires a second or two to produce a picture. If you cook it, however, you will find that it will become more and more sensitive to light, until it is actually possible to take a picture of a projectile traveling four hundred metres per second. I have such a picture. The only trouble is that some of the plates made are so sensitive to light that we cannot get a light non-active enough to develop them. Having these bromide plates then in the camera--this sensitive material coated on these glass plates in the camera--you have got to be very careful that the light does not get to them. The consequence is that the plate holders are made with extreme care.

The result of this gelatine-bromide of silver process is this: that we can have plates in packages. We can put these emulsion plates and carry them off where we please, and, what is still more important, we can put the emulsion upon very thin material, and I have here (exhibiting them) thin sheets of celluloid upon which this emulsion has been spread and pictures taken. That is not all, either; they can make it still thinner (producing small camera) they can put it on a roll and in this camera is one of those rolls, and in that box I can take a hundred pictures without reloading the instrument. The way it is done, I, when I want to produce a new surface, simply wind the old one off with this winding machine. There is an opening at the front of the camera. Press just below this, so, and you have the picture. Now just wind the film off and you are ready for the next picture. Now pull it again, and this is so easy that some manufacturers say: “You simply push the button and we do the rest for you.” That is nonsense, they don’t do the “rest” for you. A friend of mine took one of these to Europe, and with it a dozen rolls of film, all of which he used. When he returned he sent them to the manufacturers and I think he got about twelve pictures back. Not every time you press the button is a good picture produced. You have to know a little bit about the science and use a little judgment.

Such is the state of photography to-day that this material can be spread upon any kind of transparent surface. In the case of plate, they are put in holders like this, generally only two on each side, and slipped into this frame in a dark room, in which no light can be used except one emitted through a deep red chimney. (The professor here exhibited such a chimney.) Then, the material that is used for developing these pictures is somewhat different from the old method. We use organic compounds, alkaline solutions, and organic matters capable of taking up oxygen. These organic materials, in conjunction with some alkali, are capable of taking up oxygen. They produce a disoxygenizing action. After dipping, that gives you the negative.

The prints are made in a variety of ways. The facility with which these apparati can be used has led to an enormous variety. You can have an apparatus something like that, or something like this, which is smaller.