Flash in the Pan

While simple objects are fun to look at, some of the most curious items in the Cabinet today are technical processes with amazing stories at their center.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

(00:36):
That little device in your hand or your pocket, you know,
the one with the touchscreen and the web browser. It's
called a phone, but its purpose has become more important
than that. It keeps us in touch with people all
over the world, It connects us to all kinds of
social media platforms, and most importantly, it captures those everyday
moments in a snap. Our phone cameras are indispensable, and

(00:57):
they are the result of decades of research and development
to get smaller, faster, and more powerful, because, as they
always say, the best camera is the one you have
with you. But long before we carried them in our pockets,
cameras were big boxes made of wood and glass. It
took hundreds of years to get to where we are today,
and a number of photographic innovations occurred during that time,

(01:18):
But one has been forgotten over the years, which is
surprising because it was also one of the most influential.
It was the result of work performed by an English
polymath named William Henry Fox Talbot. In eighteen thirty five,
Talbot invented a way to capture images on paper. He
was aware of certain devices used by artists, such as
the camera obscura, which projected an image on the inside

(01:41):
of a small box, but he wanted a way to
save the picture permanently, and so he got to work
developing a special kind of paper. It was writing paper
coated in salt and silver nitrate. When the surface of
the paper was exposed to light, the chemicals would darken
and preserve the image imposed upon them. It was a
technique that he called the hollow type process, and Talbot

(02:02):
used his special paper to capture photos of things like
the construction of Nelson's column at Trifalgor Square and portraits
of people that he knew. The images were a stark
difference from today's photographs, though they almost seem like negatives today,
where the light portions are dark and the parts where
there should be dark are actually light in tone. But remember,
this was one of the first times that people saw

(02:23):
a reproduction of a moment that was not sketched or painted.
I mean this was groundbreaking. Meanwhile, another photographer was entering
the fray with his own invention. His name was Louis
de Guerre and he was a French artist who had
been experimenting with silver salts and how they react to light.
His camera used a copper sheet plated in silver, and
when that sheet was exposed to iodine crystal vapor, it

(02:46):
formed a coating of silver iodine on one side, which
was then blasted with external light. It took a while,
but the exposure eventually rendered a clear image. His creation
was called a de guerotype. But where the two processes
differed was in the calotype's versatility. For example, the translucent
negative image created by the calotype process could be used

(03:07):
to create positive prints. The two men also went in
different ways when sharing their gifts with the rest of
the world, and that's mostly why the calotype has all
but been forgotten by modern photographers. You see, Talbot patented
his process across England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, which cost
him a pretty penny. He also spent a lot of
money defending his patents from infringement. This led to very

(03:29):
few paid licenses for that patent and almost no lasting
use within the industry, even though Talbot's work did more
to push modern photography forward than Deguer's. In fact, by
defending his patents so vociferously, Talbot helped spur innovation among
amateurs who sought a way around expensive licenses, which pushed
the technology forward. Dagare, on the other hand, sold his

(03:51):
patent to the French government, which made the Daguerotype process
free for anyone to use anywhere in the world except
in Britain. Daygare's agent, a guy named Miles Berry, had
been granted a patent on his client's invention back in England,
so now any person looking to make de garotypes there
had to pay for a license to do so. As
for France, they compensated the inventor for his generosity with

(04:14):
a lifetime pension, and it turned out that giving away
one's patents to a more commercially viable process was the
smart thing to do. Talbot, on the other hand, only
loosened the restrictions on his own patents in the eighteen
fifties after extensive pleading from the photographic community. He begrudgingly obliged.
By eighteen fifty two, hundreds of calotypes were being produced regularly,

(04:36):
but it wasn't enough to overtake the de gherotype. A
combination of Talbot's vicious defense of his patents and the
calotype's exhaustive development process helped seal its fate. De Gerotypes
eventually fell out of favor once other technologies, such as
the ambrotype, provided quicker, less costly results, and that's what
matters most when inventing something new. It has to be faster, cheaper,

(05:00):
and better. Anything else just won't get developed. Our minds
are constantly changing. The more we experience and learn, the

(05:22):
more we unlock. We might study a new language or
a musical instrument, activities that can cause our neurons to
fire in different ways than they had before. But sometimes
the brain can be temperamental. For example, we can walk
into a room and suddenly forget what brought us there
in the first place, or we'll blank on the name
of a famous actor we're trying to figure out what
other movies they appeared in. But perhaps one of the

(05:45):
most peculiar ways our mind plays tricks on us is
deja vu deja vu was a French term that was
coined by philosopher Elmilbo rock Back in eighteen seventy six.
In English, it translates to already seen. Deja vu is
used to describe the sensation of having been in a
certain place or situation before. Many of us have experienced

(06:06):
deja vu at one time or another. Will enter a
room and suddenly be overcome with the feeling of having
been there in the past, even if it's a brand
new place. Deja vu has been linked to a number
of different neurological conditions and disorders, including epilepsy and migraines.
But there's a phenomenon that's similar to deja vu, and
it's a trick of the mind as well, except it's

(06:28):
the exact opposite. It's called jamme vou or never seen
in French. Unlike deja vu, which makes the person feel
as though they've been somewhere before, jamez vou gives someone
the sense that place that they've been to, or a
situation they've already experienced, is somehow brand new to them again.
It's hard to imagine such a thing happening to us today,

(06:48):
but we actually deal with jam may vou more often
than we realize. You can even do it right now
by picking a random word like dog or road and
repeating it out loud, over and over again. After a while,
it doesn't sound like a word anymore. Even writing at
numerous times in row achieves the same effect. Back in
two thousand and six, English researcher Chris Mullin at the

(07:10):
University of Leeds published the results of a study he
had conducted. He asked ninety four undergraduates to write out
several words multiple times. Some words were common, like door,
while others were lesser known, such as sword. Participants were
instructed to write as quickly as possible, but they were
free to stop for any reason, for example, if they
suddenly felt strange or if they're hand cramped. Mullin wasn't

(07:33):
going to turn red in the face if anyone needed
a break. They were then told to provide their reason
for the pause, and the results, seventy percent of the
group put down their pens because the terms they were
writing stopped looking like words entirely, and this typically happened
after only about a minute. There jamz vous did not
discriminate either whether a word was common or previously unknown

(07:56):
participants stopped recognizing them after they were copied about thirty
three times. In a second experiment, Mullin had everyone write
the article the an extremely common word that we are
all familiar with. It took even less time for fifty
five percent of them to stop scribbling due to ja
me vu. One person reported that the words lose their

(08:17):
meaning the more you look at them, while another claimed
almost looks like it's not really a word, but someone's
tricked me into thinking it is. Despite Mulin's modern experiment,
the concept of je ma vou goes back a lot further.
American psychologist Margaret Floyd Washburn was testing in effects all
the way back in nineteen oh seven. She had asked
one of her students to stare at a word for

(08:38):
three minutes, at which time the arrangement of the letters
began to look unlike anything in the English language. Washburn
called the phenomenon and the ensuing academic paper the loss
of associative power in words. After long fixation. Decades later,
with Chris Mullin's help, we finally had a much shorter
and much more catchy name. Much like its sister, deja

(09:01):
vu can be caused by other issues of the mind,
including epileptic seizures, but for many of us it's just
part of everyday life. Our brains are capable of strange
and wonderful things, and sometimes they make the words we
see each day look like strange shapes from another planet.

(09:23):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,

(09:46):
and you can learn all about it over at the
Worldolore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.