The Camera, Part 2

Photography is one of the most important technological, artistic and cultural advancements of the 19th century. In the second part of their look at the invention of photography, Robert and Joe consider look the dawn of photography and its major effects on the world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, everybody,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Land, and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back today to discuss a little
bit more in the history of photography, the invention of
the first identifiable photographs. Now we've already done sort of
a couple of episodes on this subject. We just had

(00:25):
a whole episode about the camera obscura, the the idea
that a closed, darkened chamber with a pinhole aperture will
project images from the outside world on a on a
darkened wall, upside down and inverted, and how this has
been used in say, the history of art, and how
it was discovered. But then in the last episode we
started talking about the precursors to modern photography. So we

(00:50):
talked about Johann Heinrich Schultz and silver nitrate, his discovery
about how silver nitrate darkens when exposed to light. We
talked about Tom Wedgewood, the dream Boy, and Humphrey Davy
and their experiments with what came to be called photograms
or shadow grams, also based on silver nitrate. And we
talked about Joseph Nissafgnieps and heliography, which involved like put

(01:14):
putting like bitumen on a on a plate and then
exposing it to light and then washing off the parts
that hadn't hardened. And so I guess we should remember
where this technology was where it was left after Tom
Wedgwood and Humphrey Davy's shadow grams. We we had figured
out that you can cote, say a piece of leather
or piece of glass or something any kind of surface

(01:35):
with silver nitrate based solution and fix images or silhouettes
onto the surface with light. But the problem was they
couldn't figure out how to fix this image so that
it was durable when exposed to more light. They needed
a way of preventing additional exposure to light from corrupting
the original image. So I'm really enjoying this exploration into photography, uh,

(01:58):
in part because it's just so much more to it
than I initially realized. It's huge. Yeah, and I felt
like I had like a pretty good grasp of the
history of photography and the invention of photography. Um, but
when you when you start digging into it and uh
and really stopping to consider this this weird almost alchemical

(02:19):
process of early photography. Um, you know, it's so easy
to take take it for granted nowadays, with our our
instant digital imagery, that is just h and it's just
like magic, and we don't think about it. We've become
immune to the magic. We've we've become immune to it.
And I think it's really helpful to to take it
apart and look back at how we made these advancements. Yeah,

(02:41):
and of course, remember you make that comparison to alchemy.
But Isaac Newton almost explicitly made that comparison. And remember
he talked about that it was a part of nature,
that that nature loves transmutation, you know, this terminology transmutation,
like the transmutation of lead into gold, which of course
the alchemists wanted to do but I couldn't find a

(03:02):
way to do and ultimately was a fool's errand because
they didn't understand things about nuclear chemistry, and you know
why that couldn't happen. But even though he's wrong in
his kind of alchemy based leaning is Isaac Newton does
make this comparison in the realm of light. He says
that light may well want to be transmuted into bodies
by nature might want to be transmuted into material changes

(03:24):
in substances you can hold in your hand. And of
course this is exactly the chemistry behind what would become photography,
light causing changes in substance. Yeah, and you know, one
of the things about the invention of photography too, I
think it's a great it's a great model for invention
to consider past inventions we've discussed and future inventions, um,

(03:46):
particularly when it comes to certain questions, and one of
the big questions that we've we've loved to ask in
regards to invention is why now, why not earlier? Why
was any given invention? Why did it come to fruition
at this particular time time and not an earlier time?
And indeed, there have been there's been some consideration on
this regarding Schultz's silver nitrate discoveries and why photography didn't

(04:10):
take off in the early seventeen hundreds. And granted we're
not talking about a huge lapse here. This is one
of those situations where a technology comes around, it's forgotten
for centuries or millennia. But but but it has led
many people to wonder, like, you know, why is there
this gap? Um? And uh, I when I was looking
into this I found a wonderful arts in society. That's
the website um story titled why wasn't Photography invented Earlier?

(04:35):
By Philip mccott. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. It's
a h MC C O U A T. If you
want to look look up this paper. But the author
points out that this question was pondered in the highly
influential History of Photography by the Gersheims uh quote. The
circumstance that photography was not invented earlier remains the greatest

(04:56):
mystery in its history. I don't I mean, that's always
a fun question to ask, but I don't know if
it's always as piercing a question as the people asking
it think it is, because technology always seems obvious looking back.
But I don't know. I mean, why wasn't the wheel
invented earlier? We talked about this in the Wheel episode.

(05:18):
We we don't know the answer. Maybe one answer as given.
I think it was the hypothesis of Richard Bullet in
that book we talked about was that the wheel just
wasn't really necessary until you had certain very specific types
of transportation scenarios. His his hypothesis is that that would
be copper mining. This is you know, the wheel showed
up there, because it's a scenario where a wheel makes

(05:40):
a huge difference compared to say a normal pack animal
that would have been used for thousands of years before that.
But on like stuff to blow your mind. We've also
asked questions about basic electrical technologies. Why didn't the ancient
Romans have friction generators or capacitors. They could have had those.
There's nothing stopping them from having these objects. They just

(06:01):
never really did it or not that we know of
for sure. And so a lot of times it's just
hard to come up with a satisfactory explanation. But I
think we should we should also question ourselves here and
question the assumptions we're making when we ask that question
with with with like an accusatory tone. Yeah. And and
mccatt does a great job of sort of tackling this
on two fronts. So, so first of all, he sort

(06:23):
of he he looks at some of the the counter
evidence to this whole mystery, right, and he points out
that Schultz's discoveries were probably not as widespread as some
historians may have interpreted, uh, and that the man's presentation
to the Imperial Academy in Nuremberg went quote largely unnoticed,
and it is work wouldn't see actual publication go after

(06:44):
his death, and his work was very likely difficult to
access and not considered of much value at the time. Quote. Furthermore,
those who actually were familiar with it were more likely
to have come across it in popular books on amusing
parlor tricks rather than in scientific journals. Yeah, like, try
to forget photography exists and pretend you just don't know

(07:05):
that this is even possible. Somebody demonstrates to you that
a bottle holding a slurry of silver nitrate, you can
make letters in the side of the bottle with a
stencil by exposing those areas to light, and then you
shake the bottle and they go away. Do you immediately conclude, Ah,
I can fix images of the natural world. I'm not

(07:25):
so sure that's obvious to people who do not have
our photography adult brains. But to be clear, we're talking
about a hundred years or so. Still, that's a considerable
chunk of time. Right. So Schultze's experiments with silver nitrate
darkening and a bottle that was in the seventeen teens,
like seventeen seventeen, and then we had Tom Wedgewood and
Humphrey Davy around the turn of the eighteen hundreds. Uh,

(07:48):
and we're gonna get to today Henry Fox Talbot and
Louis de Gare, who come up with what's really definitely
something that counts as photography around the eighteen thirties, towards
the end of the eighteen thirty. Now, another important to
effect that mccau points out here is that, of course
you have to have uh, some other key and advancements
come along in chemistry to make photography, the further evolution

(08:11):
of of photography really possible exactly. I mean, because as
we're going to see, like Dagarin Talbot's processes are more
chemically complicated than what these earlier people were trying to do. Right,
So specifically you need the isolation and production of both
iodine and bromine. But in addition to all of this, uh.
Mccau does a good job too of ruminating on the

(08:32):
role of hindsight in all of these matters. It's easy
for us to say, why didn't someone think of that earlier?
Like here are the pieces uh, And he points to
a particular study on hindsight bias. Um. This one was
a one by a Mandel patently non obvious empirical demonstration
that the hindsight bias renders patent decisions irrational from Ohio

(08:56):
State Law Journal in two in twenty in two thousand six. Okay,
so what Mandel find here? Well, so the key takeaways
from this are seventy of people who have been told
that a solution had actually been found considered that this
solution would have been obvious. Twenty percent of people who
had not been told that a solution had been found
felt that the solution would be obvious, and this held

(09:17):
true even when subjects were warned against the dangers of
hindsight bias. Okay, so just telling somebody people have already
figured out X, even if maybe it's something they didn't
already know about, makes it seem obvious to them exactly
and interestingly enough, I think this this, Uh, this falls
in a little bit with the potential dangers of narrative thinking,
which we recently discussed on our other podcast, Stuff to

(09:39):
Blow Your Mind. Um. It seems that when we learn
of an outcome, such as something from the history of invention,
we incorporate that ending into the story of the events,
and therefore the end becomes seemingly inevitable. Oh, this is
always a part of narrative. Like when you're in the
middle of a movie, you're thinking, how's it going to end?

(10:00):
But then when you get to the end, you're like,
that was obvious. Of course it had to end that way.
Of course they were going to invent photography, right. But
his Macca points out, you know, some people have have
certainly disagreed on the inevitable nature of photography. Author Cee Clark,
for instance, who in addition to writing science fiction, wrote
a lot about science and the history of science, and
he considered photography to be one of the sixteen most

(10:22):
une unexpected inventions. Oh no, I'm this has got me thinking,
what are the most unexpected inventions we've covered on the
show so far? X rays have got to be one
of them, right, that's just out of the blue, no idea.
X rays is definitely on that list, along with nuclear energy,
radio lasers, and carbon dating, uh, and of course some others.

(10:43):
Those are the ones that he highlights in covering Clark's work.
But uh. He says that one of the key things
is that a lot of the the entries on Clark's
list are our inventions that span different disciplines. And again,
I think to all the things coming together in photography.
You have the arts with painting, and you have optics,
and then you have this, uh, this chemical aspect of

(11:04):
the whole scenario as well. Oh yeah, I mean, much
like carbon dating that covers so many different disciplines. I mean,
so that's going to be like physics and nuclear chemistry
and geology and atmospheric science and archaeology. I think those
really are also the most exciting kinds of inventions, the
ones that are not just a an advance in a

(11:28):
clearly defined discipline, but something that yeah, draws from many
different sources. Absolutely. All right, on that note, we're going
to take our first break. But when we come back,
we are going to get into the next step in
the evolution of photography. We're gonna be talking about the
de Guero type. Alright, we're back, So it is time

(11:54):
to meet one of the major characters in the history
of photography, maybe the most important character, Louis gere So.
The last episode we did ended with a discussion of
Joseph Nissa Fourgnieps and his heliography method which involved using
various kinds of resin, like originally bitumen and lavender oil
that would harden when exposed to light, and then the

(12:16):
unhardened resin could be washed away and this would allow
hardened patterns of resin to form the basis of a
heliograph inside a camera box. And you could probably argue
that this did in some sense constitute photography as we
understand it. But the exposures took a really long time.
You might have to expose them for hours or even days,

(12:38):
and the resin was just not the best medium for
recording images. But this process becomes important mainly because of
the way that Nieps ended up partnering with this guy
named Louis de Gere, and they worked together for several years,
I think, beginning in eighteen twenty nine, right, and then
Nips died in eighteen thirty three at the age of
sixty eight. Uh So, really a lot of what we're

(13:01):
talking about today is like where did you go from there?
Like Nips passes his discoveries off to the gear and
then and then what comes of that? Is it callous
of me that I'm just imagining? When when Yepps died,
he made a sound and that sound was nieps. I
don't know, maybe that's not even funny. I don't know

(13:21):
why my brain goes to there um, but but it's
still It is important to note that they did work
together for for several years there, so it wasn't just like,
you know, he met and met this guy and then
he died and then the new guy took off with
it like they they were working together on this, but
they they didn't find a solution during NIPS life. Right,

(13:41):
So let's let's discuss the gere a little bit. So
his his name was Louise Jacques Monde de Gear and
he was born in sevent seven, and he was he
was primarily you could say, an artist of various kinds.
He was sort of an artist entrepreneur. He was a painter.
What else did he do? Oh, he was a printmaker
and prior to the all this photography jazz, his biggest

(14:04):
success came through the medium of diorama. Now, this is
an interesting thing. This is gonna be a little bit
different than what you probably think of when you think diorama,
because what I think of is I think of going
to a museum and seeing a lot of cool dioramas
or increasingly working on elementary school dioramas with my son.
You know, it's gluesome dinosaurs in there. Let's let's get

(14:26):
some some cardboard plants in the back of that shoebox.
And uh, let's let's get an a on this puppy.
It's always a shoebox. You cut one wall out or
you just turn it on its side, I guess, and
remove the lid. I was doing it all wrong anyway. Yeah,
but yeah, you put some action figures in there, you
do some coloring, but no, this is a little bit different,
though it's a similar kind of concept. It is creating

(14:47):
a static image or scene that is a spectacle that
simulates realism and draws attention. So the diorama, which will
explain in a minute, began around eighteen twenty one, but
before this to gear training as an artist and a painter,
and one of the things that Degare worked on was
the panorama, which was a type of public spectacle in

(15:09):
the early eighteen hundreds, I think, going back to good
Bit before then, involving three hundred and sixty degree paintings
inside an enclosed space, so there'd be like a cylinder
shaped room you go and sit inside, and then you
could simulate a whole environment by viewing this three hundred
and sixty degree painting from the inside with attempts to

(15:31):
capture as much realism as possible, like they would even
they had all these methods for recreating perspective accurately, And
so you could be in Paris maybe, but go inside
a room that looked like the city of Edinburgh and
and you know, look around and it would be like
being there. For any of our Atlanta based listeners, it's

(15:51):
been to Atlanta. I know where you're going with this.
You're probably thinking of Cyclorama, which is not about motorcycles.
It sounds potentially sounds more exciting than it is was uh,
And I say that because I'm not really sure about
its current status. It was located in its own building
next to Zoo Atlanta, and it is either in the
process of being moved or has moved to a new location. Uh.

(16:16):
So whenever you listen to this episode, look it up
and uh and see if you can find out where
it is. But the the idea of Cyclorama was that
it was uh if you visited it, you know, on
a school trip or what have you. It was this
Civil war painting that was uh, that was you that
went all the way around the walls of this circular room.

(16:37):
And they also had some like three D elements coming
out in front of it to sort of give it
this sense of depth. And then you would also be
seated in this uh, this kind of stadium seating that
would uh, that would revolve so that you could see
all of the painting while music played and so forth. Yeah,
so try to simulate being in a place, right it

(16:58):
was it was going for realism and way and this
is pretty much the same principle as the kind of
panoramas that the Gear worked on as a painter. But
in the early eighteen twenties, Digere went into this new
type of project as a as an artist and a
proprietor um that was known as the diorama. And the

(17:18):
diorama was not exactly like the panorama. It wasn't a
you know, circular thing that that went all around you,
but it was a painted image spectacle that people looked at.
And what they were really trying to do was to
create a startling level of realism in large scale painting. Yeah,
like what in a way he was really trying to

(17:40):
push beyond the medium to say like, okay, what could
I do beyond just presenting a painting of, say a landscape,
what could we do to say, simulate weather? Could we
change the lighting on it? Um? And then ultimately you know,
this involved the presentation of two sided works of art
with dramatic lighting to change you know, what you were seeing. Um.

(18:02):
You know it's it's it's difficult even looking at images
and even videos of this. It's it's often uh problematic
to try and imagine exactly what it what it consisted of.
But um, I imagine is having similarities to the older
traditions of shadow puppetry, which of course depended on on
performing something with a screen uh, and also certain dramatic

(18:26):
scroll presentation performance art form. So you find in various
cultures where you are you are taking a two D
image and you are displaying it dramatically. But the key
here in the diorama was the change changing the lighting
to bring to life one of the two versions of
the art, such as say a dormant volcano on one
side of the image and an interrupting one on the other,

(18:49):
or some or simply casting painted storm clouds with lightning
to give them the sense of give the to give
the sense that it's alive with actual storm activity. Exactly. Yeah,
it's that kind of thing. And so uh. In the
last episode I mentioned this book I've been reading called
Capturing the Light by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport, about
the invention of photography, and it quotes some contemporaneous sources

(19:13):
describing the diorama that I that I thought were kind
of helpful in establishing how powerful this medium was to people.
So there was a critic of the Paris Monthly Review
who was writing about one of Daguerre's early dioramas, which
was a painting that was supposed to represent the inside
of Canterbury Cathedral. Okay, so the critic writes this, anyone

(19:34):
who views the interior of Canterbury Cathedral from the gallery
of the diorama can with difficulty persuade himself that he
is not looking up it's almost interminable aisle from the
actual organ loft. And again, when the scene has changed
and we gaze upon the valley of Sarnan, we are
electrified by our representation, so miraculous in execution, we mark

(19:58):
so plainly before us the mountains, lake and buildings which
some of us have seen before while leaning from our
rustic balconies, that the mind loses itself in a vision
of wonder and delight. Uh. And then also they write
in their book that the Dean of Canterbury, So who
you know, from the actual cathedral came uh they say,
quote came specifically to view the diorama of his cathedral,

(20:21):
and quote could scarcely believe at the sight of the
cathedral that he was not in his own chapel. There
are reports of people so convinced by the realism of
these scenes depicted in the dioramas, like the cathedral, that
they would approach the proscenium inside the theater and try
to walk into the scenes like thinking they were real,
which reminds me of those stories of people getting freaked

(20:44):
out in in early movies when somebody would say point
a gun at the camera. There would be a train
rushing toward the camera. But yeah, So the fascinated and
enthralled reactions to the dioramas seemed to say something interesting
about the demand for visual all media and realism in
visual media, Like I'm trying to imagine how people coming

(21:05):
in off the streets to pay essentially to go to
a movie, but not a movie, just one huge painting
with dynamic lighting effects to simulate stuff like lightning or
sunshine or running water. Would you know, would just be
so enraptured by this? I mean, I guess we go
into museums to look at art usually you have an

(21:26):
idea that this is some kind of edifying experience that
you know, you learned something about history, and you're gonna
look at a lot of different artworks. I'm very interested
in the idea that people would go in to pay
to sit in the theater and just like look at
one gigantic painting, or I think they might change them
out so you might look at two in in one
sitting or something, uh, with these lighting effects and and

(21:48):
sometimes I think they had sound effects to and you'd
be like, this is this is great afternoon? Oh yeah,
I mean I can. On one hand, I think back
to visiting the Cyclorama, and the Cyclorama is a lot
more interesting than than it may have sounded. You know,
this is a cool history to it and all, uh,
you know where the painting came from, what kind of

(22:08):
you know, the varying conditions it was in over the
course of its history. But still it's it's not as
exciting as a movie, right. Uh So, on one hand,
I want to bring that experience into trying to imagine this.
But then also I think to some of the more
engaging large works of art that I've appreciated over the years.
Uh be it like an Irving Norman, Um, you know,

(22:31):
a large scale triptych or another example would be, uh,
I forget the the year of its creation, but the
huge medicine Buddha that is displayed at the met in
New York City. Uh. Like those are both large scale
pieces that you can just spend a lot of time
looking at, looking at the details, walking around, you know,
sort of adjusting the lighting insofar as you can do

(22:54):
that by moving your perspective. So with based on those experiences, yeah,
I can imagine how the dioramic experience could have taken hold,
especially in this time before these other visual medium mediums
were really available. Yeah. I think that's right. And you
mentioned adjusting the lighting just by moving around to look

(23:15):
at it from different angles. That One thing that I
think is very interesting about this is that apparently a
skilled to Gear specifically brought to this project was his
skill with lighting and I remember this is before electric
spotlights and stuff, so it's it's written that do Gear
had to basically use sunlight, like you would have the
mechanical operation of windows and shutters and skylights to direct

(23:40):
light onto the image in certain ways. And sometimes they
did employ sound effects too, so it wasn't just that.
But like, it's amazing trying to think what would you
do if you were trying to like light a play
but you had to use sunlight? Yeah, you know, it
also brings it on and just what goes into displaying
art in a museum, you know, just all the lighting

(24:00):
and a placement, uh, considerations that have to be in
effect just to be able to not even think about
the physical location, to be able to focus on the
art itself. Yeah. So do Garre find success with the diorama?
This does eventually prove to be a successful money making operation,
and uh, but Gear is not satisfied. He doesn't want

(24:22):
to stop there. He remains interested in this thing of
increasing realism in art, and so you can pretty easily
see how this might set someone on the road toward
developing photography. Yeah, I mean his interest lined up perfectly
again kind of in hindsight, but he was a painter.
He was a camera obscurity enthusiast, an inventor, and someone

(24:45):
who was eager to experiment with new technologies. Right. He
was on this hunt for ever increasing realism in art.
He was sort of obsessed with capturing realism in images,
but he didn't have the tools to get as much
realism as he wanted, and he became interested in discovering
what those tools might be, even though he didn't really
have any scientific training. Like the Gere was not a scientist.

(25:07):
He was an artist. And this brings another thing to
mine and perhaps you can comment on this from from
the book you were reading, But it also seems that
the Gear had either personal charisma or just very good
social networking skills because his his biography, you know, you
can pinpoint all the various important connections he's making, be

(25:28):
it with uh, you know, like a key inventor like
like Nips, or various important and influential members of the
of the French academies. Yeah, you're exactly right. I mean
we I don't think we were really going to get
into this in the episode, but like his friendship with
Charles Chevalier ended up proving very important and um, yeah,

(25:48):
he he seemed to make friends well like people liked him.
He was charismatic. He was he was a remarkable person.
He did not seem to have just a rogues list
of enemies that he made impair, not like Adolph Sachs,
the inventor of the saxophone, who instantly got into trouble.
But no, yeah, you're exactly right in the point you
make there. Yeah, like de Gare had strengths he was

(26:11):
bringing to this invention process that we're not necessarily in
strengths in say empirical research or the sciences. They were
all kinds of other strengths. They were strengths with knowledge
of the arts, with hands on experience and how people
re ate relate to media and imagery and in the
arts and in the dioramas and the panoramas. It was

(26:32):
networking and social skills. He had a lot of this
going on. Yeah, I mean, in a way, I'm reminded
of Jim Hinson, you know, when you when you look
at the at the skills he brought to the table,
like you know, not only was he it was the artistic,
but he was also who you know, seemed to have
have you know, a lot of personal charisma, was great
at working with people, had a good business mindset. So

(26:53):
you had all of these skills helping to to to
leverage what they could achieve in life. Yeah, And so Gara,
of course, was also familiar with optical aids in art,
like the camera obscure. I think you mentioned that, And
like others before him, he became sort of obsessed with
trying to fix the images they were projected in a

(27:13):
camera obscura by some chemical means. And in their book,
Watson and Rappaport make an interesting argument. They say the
following quote, had he known more of the complexities of chemistry,
he might have been daunted. Instead, it was precisely his
scientific naivete that allowed him to tackle the challenges that

(27:33):
lay lay ahead, unaware of the mind field of potential
failure that lay before him. Now. I don't know if
they're right about that, but that's a very interesting read
on the story, that it's essentially the fact that he
doesn't know what he's doing that that gives him the
energy to do it. Like no one had probably convinced

(27:54):
him that this was an astounding task he was that
he was setting out to conquer. Yeah, like nobody had.
He was not convinced that he could not do it right. Again.
I don't know if that's right, but it's very interesting.
I like that a lot. Uh and so do Gare
seems to have begun experimenting with with attempts to invent
photography around eighteen twenty four, so a few years after

(28:15):
his first success with the diorama and his work. Habits
were reportedly devoted bordering on manic like. His friends said
that he would stay in his laboratory studio for days
at a time, that he would miss meals. Sometimes he'd
work without sleeping. His wife became very concerned about him.
There's one story that we only have for many years

(28:36):
after the fact, so it's somewhat questionable whether it's true.
But this comes from a French chemist named Jean Baptiste
Andre Duma, and Watson and Rappaport relay this story in
their book. They say that one day in eighteen twenty seven,
Duma reports that after he had been giving a lecture
at the Sorbonne in Paris, um he was approached by

(28:57):
a woman and h here's how it goes. Quote a
woman who seemed to be in a very worried state
of mind. Monsieur Dumas, She said, I have to ask
you a question of vital importance to myself. I am
the wife of Dagere, the painter. He has for some
time been possessed by the idea that he can fix
the images of a camera. He is always at the thought.

(29:19):
He cannot sleep at night for it. I am afraid
he is out of his mind. Do you, as a
man of science, think it can be done? Or is
he mad? In the present state of our knowledge, replied
Duma it cannot be done, but I cannot say it
will always remain impossible, nor set them in down as
mad who seeks to do it, which I'm sure to

(29:40):
her was like the worst possible kind of answer, right,
because it's like, so she couldn't be told like, yes,
you need to make him stop, but also couldn't be
told that, yeah, I think he could do that. It's
like it's probably impossible, but he should keep trying. But
it kind of plays into this idea of you know,
the non scientists just plow owing obliviously into the cutting

(30:02):
edge of chemistry. There's something extremely charming and attractive about that.
I agree, I mean, especially again with hindsight knowing that
he he eventually succeeds. Yeah, I guess most people who
tried to do this probably would not succeed. But to Gare,
I mean, he seemed he was dedicated to his work,
even if he wasn't scientifically trained. He was clearly very clever.

(30:22):
You know, he picked up on things. He was good,
you know, working, working, solving problems with his hands. And
Sodge's efforts failed for years until through a mutual friend,
he came into contact with the man we were talking
about in the last episode and who we've mentioned several
times now shows f Nissa Fogniepps, the scientist who had
invented the crude bitumen based method of heliography in the

(30:47):
in the eighteen twenties. And I think here we can
sort of mark a turning point for Togere. Yeah, I
mean he's he's made a connection with someone with expertise
in the matter, and he can he can combine that
with his own experimentation and uh, you know, they the
two only worked together again for like four years before
Nives passed away. It was the eighteen thirty three, and

(31:09):
they were unable to come up with with anything that
really worked that really solved the problem. But it's sort
of I think this set to gear on on a
productive road so to get continued work here on this uh.
And apparently by by eighteen thirty eight he had a
process worked out that was pretty solid, and by eighteen
thirty nine he was actually ready to share it around

(31:32):
to show it to people potential investors made right um,
and he showed it to various French luminaries and finally
to the French Academies of Science and Art. Yes. And
this process of taking a photograph that he revealed in
eighteen thirty nine, this is what became known as the
Guero type. Right. And again, like all these other photographic

(31:54):
processes we've been talking about, it sounds like nothing short
of an alchemical act of wonder. Here's how it's described
by Malcolm Daniel from the Department of Photographs at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. YEA, he's got several good essays
that you can easily find on about the history of photography. Quote,
the process revealed on that day seemed magical. Each Degara

(32:15):
type is a remarkably detailed, one of a kind photographic
image on a highly polished silver plated sheet of copper
sensitized with iodine vapors, exposed in a large box camera,
developed in mercury fumes, and stabilized or fixed with salt
water or hypo sodium theo sulfa. Right, So, so do

(32:36):
get picked up on the work that others had done
with silver based compounds. Remember from the last episode, Uh,
Tom Wedgewood's shadow grams or photograms were made by painting
a surface with silver nitrate before exposure, uh. And then
the areas that were exposed to light would darken, but
eventually the whole thing, of course, in Wedgewood's photo photograms
would darken all over when they were exposed to more

(32:59):
bright light. So could they couldn't fix the image, It
wouldn't stay there without continuing to expose and degrade. And
to Gara's method solved that problem. So to explain a
little more fully, so his method involved, at first, you
would create a light sensitive silver compound. By you'd start
with a plate like a copper plate that had a
silver treatment of silver coating on one side, and this

(33:22):
would be the surface on which the image was projected. Okay,
on the silver surface. Then you take the silver coated
surface and you would expose it to iodine vapors, and
these iodine vapors would react with the silver to produce
silver iodide. A silver iodide is also highly photosensitive, and
bits of it that are exposed to light quickly darkened
as they break down into particles of metallic silver. Uh So,

(33:46):
once the plate was made sensitive to light by turning
its surface to this to contain the silver iodide, of course,
during this whole process and needs to be kept dark, right,
it would then be exposed to light on the back
wall of a camera or obscura right, So you'd use
the camera obscure process, but instead of just projecting on
the wall, you'd project on this plate that that was

(34:07):
now covered in silver iodide. And then of course the
silver iodide would react with the light in proportion to
how much light there was on every little bit of
the surface, which would make a copy of the image. Now, Originally,
there was still a problem here in that, like Nieps's process,
this really required extremely long exposure times, which is not

(34:27):
practical if you want to capture anything that's moving or
living or you know, or dynamic in any way. But
Doge got around this by employing the concept of chemically
quote developing the photograph kind of like you would do
when you develop photos today, when you go into a
dark room, right, you put a photo into the developing liquid,
and originally there's something on it that's invisible to you.

(34:50):
You can't even see it, but the developing liquid brings
out the image. And this meant a brief exposure to
a light based image, maybe just a few minutes, could
be developed by exposing the plate to mercury fumes, making
the reaction more dramatic and bringing out the contrast in
the image between the light and dark areas on the plate.

(35:10):
And then finally, the process would fix the image so
that further exposure to light wouldn't darken any more of
the silver iodide. Uh. And the way they did that
is they would wash the plate off with hot salt water,
which would remove whatever silver iodide remained and then give
you a stable, fixed image on your reflective silver plate.
So to get revealed them the methods. But he retained

(35:32):
a patent on the equipment and he received a lifetime
pension in exchange from the academies. Yeah, which that's a
clever move. So you give him a pension so he
doesn't need to keep making money off of like enforcing
a license on the process, right, so other people can
use the Jaguero type process. And this process would reign
supreme for like twenty years because he was like, yeah,

(35:55):
you can use it. Yeah. Uh. So another great thing
about history photography is that, as with last episode, uh,
some of the images, the key important historical images are
still available today and we can look at them. We
can they take us back to the earliest days of
a photographic record, in the earliest days of the of

(36:17):
the development of this technology. The earliest I think reliably
dated Daguara type comes from eighteen thirty seven. And uh,
it's uh, it's like a lot of these these images
that he tested has like some plaster casts and it's
still life. Uh. And he he'd like to use plaster
casts apparently because they were they were very reflective because

(36:38):
they're white and they don't move. That being key because
you're talking in an exposure time of like ten to
twelve minutes. Here and in eighteen thirty eight he made
the first reliably dated photograph of a human being. And
this this is a famous image and this image is
probably gonna be the lead image for this episode. On

(37:00):
our landing page at invention pod dot com. It was
an eight a m photograph of the busy boulevard Do Tempel.
It sounds French enough, I guess. I mean I'm not
French either, Do Tempel do Temple spelling Temple. So it's
a it's a city street escape. But then if you
look to the like lower left hand corner, you can

(37:23):
clearly see a shoeshiner and their customer. They're visible and
uh and and these are the first two human beings photographed.
And it is it's haunting because you look at them
and it's almost like they're the first humans right, like
you're gazing back in time to see Adam and Eve,
except instead of Adam and Eve, it's a it's just
this guy getting in his shoe shine. Yeah, but there's

(37:45):
so there are several things that make the image fascinating
and haunting. One is that, uh, they're the only two
this this big scene of a street. You know, it
seems like you should be able to see lots of
people and maybe there are more hidden somewhere in the background,
but since they're closer to the camera, it seems like
they're the only two people in the image. On this
otherwise deserted street, which is a little creepy to begin with, right,
because it looks like what twenty eight days later or

(38:07):
something exactly, But this was eights playing in the background.
But this was eight am on a busy of French Street.
So in actuality there are people moving all over the place,
but since the exposure time was so long, these were
apparently the only two individuals who were not moving and

(38:28):
therefore the only ones we see. There's all this like
invisible motion, invisible activity that's just lost to us. And
so when you think about that, the image is even crazier. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean there's some other figures. It's hard to pick
out exactly what. There are some other figures that could
be humans in here, I'm not positive. But another thing
about them is that they're um like the buildings are

(38:51):
sharper in the image than the people are. The people
are kind of like phantoms. They're like shadow people in
the image, probably because they were moving a little bit
it right. Anyways, it's a remarkable image. You've probably seen
it before, but if you haven't, check it out, Like
I said, I'm going to make sure that it's on
the landing page for this episode at invention pot dot com.
I mean all of the earliest photos make me feel

(39:13):
a little creepy. Oh yeah, I mean you're gazing back
in time, right, Yeah, I mean, I guess you always
are when you look at a photo, but especially in
this case, because you're you're getting closer to that. It's
almost like reaching the ends of the earth, right, the
ends of the photographic record. And granted people look like
people before that as well, in the same way that
it's it's kind of strange when you're like, oh, the

(39:35):
first color pictures, you know, as if the world was
black and white before these images came and came around. Yeah,
I mean it's hard for us who are used to
photography to appreciate how bizarre and mystical and earth shaking
this technology was. I I found an article that Edgar
Allan Poe wrote about this invention. He wrote about the

(39:55):
Jaguaro type in eighteen forty in a Philadelphia publication called
alex Unders Weekly Messenger. Did you come across this, Rob?
I did not, but I'm not surprised because Poe, as
we recently discussed on stuff to bow your mind, you know,
not only a writer of of these maccab tales, but
also wrote about science. Yeah, number one, he says, quote

(40:16):
the instrument itself must undoubtedly be regarded as the most
important and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science.
So he's already going all in um. But then he
goes into more depth about why this is quote. All
language must fall short of conveying any just idea of

(40:37):
the truth. And this will not appear so wonderful when
we reflect that the source of vision itself has been,
in this instance the designer. Perhaps, if we imagine the
distinctness with which an image is reflected in a positively
perfect mirror, we come as near the reality as by
any other means. For in truth, the Daguero typed plate

(40:59):
is infinitely we use the term advisedly, is infinitely more
accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands.
If we examine a work of ordinary art by means
of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature
will disappear. But the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing

(41:22):
discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity
of aspect with the thing represented. The variations of shade
and the gradations of both linear and aerial perspective are
those of truth itself in the suprem nous of its perfection.
So to come back to da Gear, you know, his
again his background was was heavily artistic, but he also

(41:44):
realized the scientific possibilities, you know, in part I imagine
by talking to various French luminaries who had interest in
the sciences. But he ended up wowing people with photos
not only of you know, bits of sculpture and in
the street scenes, but also photos of fossils. A dead
spider really excited some folks, as did a Deguara type

(42:07):
of the moon. That's right, and that that combination of
interests in the arts and the sciences came together I
think when it was first presented, Because the official debut
of the Daguero type process was in eighteen thirty nine.
One of the events here was on August nineteen, eighteen
thirty nine, when Degara gave an explanation of the process
before a joint session of the French Academy of Sciences

(42:28):
and the Academy of Fine Arts UM. But of course
we should point out that the deguerotype does have limitations.
Even though the images are in many ways still quite
striking today. One of the limitations is that, um, it's
not making a negative, it's making a positive image on
a highly reflective silver surface, which meant that the image

(42:50):
could only be viewed from certain angles and ideally like
needed to be viewed when reflecting a dark surface in
front of it. If you were to make a daguerotype
reflect a light surface, the deguerotype kind of looks like
a negative of itself. Another problem, of course, is that you're,
you know, dealing with metal plates, right, which are ultimately
not going to be as uh convenient for people as say,

(43:13):
like printing on some kind of paper. Yeah. Each dagarattype,
it's important to note, is a one of a kind production.
So when when if you were to go to get
a deguarat type taken of something, and there wasn't a
question of how many copies you would need and and
do you want a wallet size with that, you could
make a copy of a degaratype, And the way you

(43:34):
do it is you take it to de guaratype of
the deguarat type. Well yes, but but but as you's
gonna imagine, like that was not a tremendously convenient process, right,
not as convenient as just getting like a photo negative
that you can that you can copy out multiple times.
So I have a question I've been wondering about, which is,
obviously Degar was very interested in the idea of realism

(43:56):
in art, improving realism in art. He'd done it with
the pan or ama, the diorama, and then with ultimately
the Daguera type. Is photography necessarily in line with Daguerre's quest?
I mean, first of all, it seems like the answers
obviously yes, and I think it probably did fall in
line with Daguerre's quest. And also when you consider the
you know, what were the ideal aspects of artistic pursuit

(44:19):
of the time, which we touched on in the last episode. Yeah, exactly.
But it also does make me ask the question, well,
what actually is realism? Because we've already discussed the ways
that any fixed two D representation of the world, however
automatic and objective, like made by a camera instead of
by a human hand, is not exactly the same as
what the physical world really is, which is three D

(44:42):
and actually for D because it's always changing over time.
What if the photograph actually helped make art more realistic
in the sense of a photograph, like more like the
image of a photograph. Are there types of scenes in
reality that might be more realist stickley conveyed by less
objective fixed medium like painting, at least until like motion

(45:06):
pictures come along. Yeah, I mean it makes me think
of say impressionism for instance. Um, you know, there's a
it's certainly you get you get closer to the image,
you see the it falls apart in the same way
that that earlier description was talking about, you know how
from Edgar Allen Poe. But at the same time, when

(45:26):
you think about how we actually view reality, about how
our minds process uh this uh the sense data and
kind of stitched together and form something concrete out of
things that are at times vaguely perceived, it makes me
think that, well, when I'm looking at a monet, perhaps
like that is more in line with how my brain

(45:48):
is processing reality as opposed to the uh you know,
the the the objectivity of of a pure photograph. Yeah,
I agree. I mean, certainly a photograph is going to
be more object of a realistic in a certain sense
in that like it's directly sampling the light rays that
are actually there and would be hitting your eye in
that instant moment when you were looking at a thing,

(46:10):
And I guess human painting is never going to capture
that level of objectivity. But there there are ways in
which I wonder if, especially in scenes that are moving,
that that painting suggests things to the mind that are
more more accurately suggestive of what memories or impressions say

(46:31):
of a scene are like than a photo is. Yeah,
and uh and again it it is hard to really
wrapprehend our heads around all of that because I do
think we are so influenced by photographs and we think
of our memories as photographs or as motion pictures when
they're they're really not quite the same at all. Yeah, alright, well,

(46:53):
I think we should take another break and then when
we come back we will discuss a rival of Dagar's,
Henry Fox Talbot. Alright, so we're we're back, and we're
leaving France, we're entering England, and we're dealing with the
other major individual, uh from this time period in the

(47:13):
birth of photography. Right, So, around the same time Degere
was experimenting with ways to capture the light, and of
course remember we we didn't mention again, but In one
of the earlier episodes, we mentioned that Degare wrote this
letter to a friend of his, you know, when he
had perfected the process, where he said, I have captured
the light and arrested its flight. The sun itself shall
draw my pictures. It seems fitting for the kind of

(47:35):
guy to Gea was kind of a grandiose artist, right,
He's he's making Uh he's sort of like I've become
a god. Um. But anyway, so yeah, Around the same
time that Degare was doing these experiments, an Englishman named
Henry Fox Talbot who lived eighteen eighteen seventy seven, had
independently been working on the invention of photography, and according

(47:57):
to several people who tell the story, he he was
sort of inspired by a simple limitation, which is that
he couldn't really draw. That's gonna hold you back, Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So unlike to Gere, who was a natural artist but
was not really trained as a scientist, Henry Talbot was
sort of a natural scientist. Like he grew up shy, intelligent, inquisitive.

(48:19):
He was a boy of the English aristocracy, so he had,
you know, he had leisure and means to do experiments
and to be kind of the gentleman scientist of the day, right,
and so he had leisure and means to do experiments,
and he was known for doing lots of them. He like,
he had a reputation for doing chemistry experiments in his
house that caused explosions, much to the amusement of his mother.

(48:40):
Uh and I think to the worry of at least
people who they were trying to get insurance policies from.
But he grew up with an interest in mathematics and
the natural sciences, including botany and astronomy as well as chemistry.
But he was, you know, one of those people. He
had lots of interests. He was interested in ancient Egypt,
in the you know, sculpture and the fine arts and
all that. Uh. He went on to become a graduate

(49:01):
of Trinity College, Cambridge, and eventually he was a Liberal
MP in the House of Commons. Now, remember in the
last episode we had a section where we talked about
the many things that photography fundamentally changed when it was invented.
And one thing, of course was realism and art, but
another thing was accuracy in science. If you have an
interest in botany like Henry Fox Talbot did, and you

(49:23):
want to make observations about a species of plant, like
documenting the vascular structure of the leaves of a plant,
or describing the gonads of a flowering plant. You today
can take a picture, but before that, before you could
take a picture, you needed to be able to draw
what you were making observations about. And so there's a

(49:45):
story told in another one of these essays by the
photo historian Malcolm Daniel about when Henry Fox Talbot was
on his honeymoon in Italy in eighteen thirty three. He
was trying to sketch a picture of a lake called
Lake Como, and uh, he of course did not have
Daguerre's natural talent for drawing, but he did have the
aid of an optical device. In this case, it was

(50:05):
not a camera obscura, though he had used those before,
but it was a camera lucida, camera lucidam, which is
Latin for a bright room or a well lit room.
And this was sort of like I was trying to
think of a good way to describe it, it's almost
kind of like an augmented reality device. It was a
refraction lens that you could position above a piece of

(50:27):
paper or other surface. That you wanted to draw on,
and then the lens would capture the image that you
aimed at at and then refracted about ninety degrees, so
you could look through the lens down at the paper
you're drawing on and see a version of the object
or image in front of you superimposed onto this blank canvas.
And then of course this could aid you in tracing

(50:49):
or reproducing. But unfortunately Talbot discovered that even with the
aid of a camera Lucida, he was unable to reproduce
images of the natural world accurate, accurately in a way
that satisfied him. And just as a side note, this
is funny. I'm picturing this image of him on his
honeymoon and he's got a camera Lucida and he's trying

(51:09):
to draw, and it reminds me of like Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold, you know, another like nineteenth century englishman
being insufferable and self serious on his honeymoon. These are
the very guys that would just be on their their
phone the whole time if such a technology hadn't had
existed during their hunt. Right, yeah, what are you doing, honey?
Ignorant armies are clashing by night so Talbot was trying

(51:33):
to use technology to make up for his um is
lacking artistic skill. Yeah, and he was unsatisfied with what
he could do, even with the aid of a camera
lucida or a camera obscura. But he wondered would it
be possible to capture the kind of image projected in
a camera obscura? And he he wrote, quote, how charming

(51:54):
it would be if it were possible to cause these
natural images to imprint themselves durably remain fixed upon the paper.
So he's got the bug to write the photography inspiration
germ has implanted itself in young Henry Fox Talbot's brain.
And this was around eighteen thirty three, eighteen thirty four,

(52:14):
so this was before Dagare had developed and refined his
process in France, and Talbot set about conducting experiments to
discover a method of capturing the image, originally working off
the same types of chemicals we've talked about several times already,
photosensitive silver compounds like silver nitrate, silver chloride, and eventually

(52:34):
silver iodide like Deger's method uses. Now remember Gear was
using metal plates like copper plates treated with a silver coating.
That would be the reactive surface, but Talbot was going for,
I guess, a less durable method, so he was exposing
the image on treated paper. So while de Garat types

(52:55):
produced superior quality images, again each one was one of
a kind. Abot's method, though, could produce an unlimited number
of prints from a single negative. Yeah, So unlike the
Digerat type method, which produced a positive image, the Talbot
method was would produce a photo negative like we're used
to seeing come out of a camera today, and this
would be on a like a piece of paper treated

(53:17):
with some kind of silver based solution. Unfortunately for Talbot,
he worked on most of this privately for years, and
even though he had already discovered a lot of the
principles of photography in the mid eighteen thirties, did Gear
beat him to announcing and publicly demonstrating the process. And
Doge's photos just looked better because of differences in materials

(53:40):
and methods. They were more durable and more impressive to
look at generally than Talbot's. And again, house it just
had a greater level of detail. That's right now. One
of Talbot's important contributions to the process of photography was
actually suggested to him by his friend John Herschel, who
was the son of the astronomer William Herschel who discovered
planet Uranus uh now John Herschel. And remember that sorry

(54:04):
the Dagara type method, it used hot salt water originally
or earlier on to fix the image on the plate
by washing off any remaining sodium iodide, and this would
stop the image from continuing to react when exposed to light.
Over time, it would fix the image so it stayed
like it was. And this fixing method was only sort of,

(54:24):
only partially effective. Herschel suggested instead of just washing with
hot saltwater, using hypo sulfite of soda instead, which was
a much more useful fixer than regular salt. So that's
an important chemical insight. But in the early years, unfortunately
for Talbot, his process was not anywhere near as close

(54:44):
to to a success as to gears. It was the
age of the Dagara type after this, and I guess
we'll explore more about the age of the Dagara type
in the next episode. But digs process was just much
more popular for several reasons. Number one, I think because
digars images were more durable and they were clear, you know,
they were sharp and clear and they looked really good, whereas, uh,

(55:07):
whereas Talbot's images were more kind of like hazy and ephemeral.
And also Talbot tried to patent the process and make
money off of it, whereas to get you know, I
think to Garrett, he patented his equipment. Equipment was patented,
but not but not the process, so anybody could go
out and do it exactly. But this brings this episode
brings us really to to the birth of photography, the

(55:29):
Guero type age. Yeah. Um. And in the next episode
of the show, we're going to continue with photography, and
I think the next episodes really kind of be kind
of a bridge between photography and the in the moving image,
in the motion picture, because that's also part of our
our ongoing trajectory on the show. But in the next

(55:51):
episode we'll get into into some of the advancements that
also took the the photograph out of the hands of
the elite and made it more of of of a
technology that could be utilized by more or less everyday people,
and we'll get into just continually discussed just how it

(56:11):
changed the world and how difficult it is for us
to really really grasp the idea of a pre photographic
world exactly. I'm excited for next time. In the meantime,
if you want to check out more episodes of Invention,
if you want to see that that image that I
was discussing earlier, and maybe I'll throw a secondary image
on there as well, you can find the landing page
for this episode at invention pod dot com. Um Also,

(56:35):
if you want to support the show, which of course
we encourage you to do, the best thing you can
do is make sure that you rate and review us
wherever you have the power to do so, and make
sure you have subscribed to Invention. Huge thanks to our
buddy Scott Benjamin for research assistance and to our excellent
audio producer Torri Harrison. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or

(56:56):
any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just
to say hello, you can contact us at our email address,
which is contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is
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Heart Radio is the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or

(57:18):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H