Happy Throwback Thursday, friends! Today, we’re going to celebrate the 182nd anniversary of a cousin of something you probably touch each and every day. (Think: a certain feature of your cellphone.)
But before we get to that “cousin”, let’s look at the family’s patriarch: The camera. Long before the camera as we know it existed, scientists knew that certain substances, known silver salts, darkened when exposed to sunlight. In 1727, German scientist, Johann Heinrich Schulze, proved that the darkening of these silver salts was solely due to light and had nothing to do with exposure to heat or air. In 1777, Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, discovered that silver chloride was also darkened with exposure to light and afterward, it became insoluble in an ammonia solution. Later, Thomas Wedgwood put this practice to the test when he set leaves and insect wings on ceramic pots coated with silver nitrate then exposed it to light, thus producing “photos” of his work. The downfall, however, was that these images weren’t permanent because he didn’t incorporate a fixing mechanism.
By 1825, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier of Paris to take the world’s first “permanent photograph.” He had worked on developing (pardon the pun) a way to make the images stick since 1816. Eleven years later, he found success when he took a photo from his window that required an 8-hour exposure on pewter coated with bitumen. This photographic process was called “heliography”.
A short time later, Niépce partnered with inventor Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre to improve the heliographic process.
Daguerre took Niépce’s work a step further when he invented the process of exposing on a plate coated with silver iodide before exposing the plate again to mercury vapor. This process produced a high-contrast, extremely sharp image. Afterward, he succeeded in affixing the image with a common salt solution. This process was named the Daguerreotype and was the birth of the true early photograph as we know it.
Daguerre’s invention was announced to the public on today’s date, August 19, in 1839 at a meeting of Paris’s French Academy of Sciences. Many would-be photographers were quick to capitalize on this new invention and portrait studios were set up in large cities around the world. By 1850, more than 70 Daguerreotype studios existed in New York City alone! (These Daguerreotypes, also known as tin-type photos, were on such a thin piece of metal – or tin – that over time, they often cracked, which is why they’re so rare to find in tact today. They also tended to darken over many years, and if you’re lucky enough to see one these days, it’s likely so dark, you may not even be able to make out the details.)
One of the earlier portrait studios in New York was operated by someone whose name may sound familiar: Mathew Brady. (Yes, that Mathew Brady!) At the age of 16, Brady, a talented artist, met portrait painter William Page and became Page’s student. In 1839, Brady and Page began studying with Page’s former teacher, Samuel F. B. Morse. (Yes, the inventor or Morse Code!) Turs out that Morse met Louis Jacques Daguerre in France earlier that same year and when he returned to the U.S., he was excited to show off the newest invention of capturing images.
Brady’s initial contribution to the art of photography was limited to manufacturing leather cases that held the fragile tintypes, but a short time later, when Mr. Morse decided to open a photography studio and offer classes, Brady was one of the first students to sign up.
By 1844, Brady opened his own portrait studio, and by 1845, he started exhibiting his portraits of famous Americans such as Senator Daniel Webster and poet Edgar Allan Poe.
By the 1850s, the Daguerreotype was on the road to being replaced by ambrotype photography. Ambrotypes were produced by using albumen-based reproductions on cotton-based paper produced from huge (really huge!) glass negatives. (Albumen is basically a concoction made of egg whites, or rather the protein in egg whites, along with silver nitrate and salt, and though the thick paper these photos were printed on were actually more durable than the thin tin used in Daguerreotypes, the albumen faded after many years, so if you’re lucky enough to see one of these photos today, they may be very light to the point that you may not be able to make out the details. Oddly, the silver used in the process still leaves a sheen on the darker parts of the photo, though, so you may still see the silver coating in parts of the photo today, even if the actual picture has faded.) Ambrotype photography was what was used in most American Civil War documentary photographs.
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