December 27, 2021 • 38 mins
Daguerre comes up almost any time we mention photography, but we’ve never covered his life story. Well before he figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura, he was an artist and innovator in entertainment.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. You have
probably noticed that there's a name that pops up pretty
much anytime we're discussing photography in history, and that is Dgear.
(00:26):
We have referenced him and his Dagara types and the
invention of that many times on the show, and we
often use it as a reference point for when other
people are taking pictures and how far along they've come.
We're probably going to reference it again because he really
innovated and touched a lot of lives. But well before
he figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura,
(00:48):
he was an artist and an innovator and entertainment. So
today we're going to talk about all of that because
we've never covered him before, and of course we will
also talk about his work in photography. Is one of
those people that has come up so many times that
we had to have the conversation about whether we had
already done this episode. Yes, Tracy, are you sure we
have a covered to get I just looked through the
(01:10):
whole spreadsheet. Not in there, so He was born Louis
Jacques Monde Dagure on November eighteenth seven, about a hundred
and eighty kilometers west of Paris, in a town called
the Family, especially to Get's father, who was named Louis.
They were royalists in their politics, and Louis had a
(01:33):
sister who even was named after Marie Antoinette. That sister
was born in seventeen nine one. The senior Louis de
Guer worked as a court crier before the revolution, and
that was a civil service job, but as the French
Revolution really heated up, that job, of course went away
for a while. That meant that the family moved to Orleans,
(01:55):
where Louis Senior found work as a clerk in an estate,
and in seventeen nine d three, of course, Louis the
sixteenth was guillotined and the Reign of Terror began. Degere's
father was employed by Louis Philippe, the second Duke dor Leon,
who sided with the revolution, but he was of course
a cousin of the king, and he was eventually guillotined
(02:16):
for his association with the House of Bourbon. And though
Louis da Sr. Remained employed at the estate, this seems
to have pretty much meant that life in Orleans was
a little bit more somber than it had been when
the family first arrived there. There are some holes in
the story of de Gere's early life. Some of that
(02:38):
is just because it would have been unusual for just
a regular child's life to be well documented, but it's
also because of the period in which he was born.
So consider, for example, he would have still been basically
a baby, not even two years old, when the Bastille
was stormed in seventeen nine, so his whole childhood was
happening at a time when the monarchy was falling, revolution
(03:00):
was raging. That all would have been very difficult for
his royalist father, and it also would have meant that
a lot of just so called normal life was significantly disrupted.
So we know that Louis Dag was enrolled in public
school in Orleans, but due to those constantly shifting sands
of the French government, there were stretches, long stretches sometimes
(03:24):
where classes did not assemble, so Dag got something of
a patchwork education. But he spent that ample free time
that he was afforded by the gaps in school to
develop his natural talent, which was drawing. While Louis de
Gre's name is forever linked to photography, he really did
not start out on a career path that would suggest
(03:45):
that outcome. In eighteen hundred, Louis de ge drew a
portrait of his parents. This was sort of an audition.
The skill that he exhibited with this portrait led to
him being offered an apprenticeship, not exactly with an artist,
though it was with an architect. This was a stable
career path for an artistic thirteen year old in a
(04:07):
time when France really did not have that many stable
career paths. So for three years he dutifully works at
perfecting his ability to render the drawings of building structures.
That's something he seems to have really enjoyed. He loved
recreating true life detail in his drawing, and architectural drawings
were to him just another iteration of that. Now, as
(04:29):
a note, this is something that I stumbled across a
lot while researching this episode. You will sometimes see it
mentioned in biographical writeups of de Gere that he also
worked as a revenue officer during this early period of
his life, without much additional information about it, and it
kind of seems like this might actually be the result
(04:49):
of some confusion due to his name being the same
as his father's, and since we know that his father
did work as a clerk at an estate, that kind
of seems like the most likely scenario. When the younger
Louis de Gare finished his apprenticeship at the age of sixteen,
he didn't take the next step into architecture. Instead, he
went back to his love of art. He decided to
(05:11):
move to Paris to study painting and to try to
make a life as an artist. This was something that
his parents found terrifying. They had supported his artistic tendencies,
but there was just uncertainty and a lack of stability
in an art career, and then, on top of that,
they were also concerned that the young de Gere would
fall into a life of debauchery in Paris. Finally, after
(05:34):
a lot of discussion, they made an arrangement that was
agreeable to the parents, and the son alike Louise father
got him an apprenticeship in Paris with Ignacio Eugeno. Maria
Degatti and Degatti was born and tour in Italy in
seventeen fifty eight, and, like young Louis, de Gare. He
showed artistic proclivity from a very young age, and he
(05:56):
too had moved to Paris to pursue his art. Although
he and so when he was in his thirties, and
by the time his life met up with Digres, he
had become a renowned theatrical designer and a painter for
the Paris Opera, and de Gare moved in with him
as part of this apprenticeship deal. That was something his
parents insisted upon. This was a time in his life
(06:17):
when Louis de Gare lived a pretty enviable existence. He
was young, he was making connections in the Paris art scene,
and he made the most of that. There are stories
about how much fun he was at parties and how
he would go into such gatherings walking on his hands.
He loved Paris, and Paris loved him back. He was
really beloved among his peers. At one point he even
(06:40):
appeared on stage and a small role in the Paris Opera. Yeah,
there was one section of a biography about him I
was reading where it said that he knew how to
walk a tight rope, and that he may have learned
this when he was a young boy. Because festivals would
come through the area where they lived, and I'm like, yes,
but how did that come up while he's just hanging
(07:03):
out with his friends, Like, oh, would you like to
see me? What walk this tyrope that just happens to
be here at present? That's a little less clear, but
he had a lot of fun skills, it sounds like.
And just as he had spent three years as an
architect's apprentice, he spent three years under Degatti's tutelage before
deciding that he wanted to move on. And this was
(07:24):
a pretty natural progression because his next move was to
take on an assistant ship with another artist, and this
time it was Pierre Provost, famed panorama painter. Panoramas are
enormous paintings. They were mounted in circular rooms and intended
to be viewed from a central viewing platform. They had
made their debut in London in and then Paris had
(07:47):
quickly embraced this medium, and Provost really excelled at creating
deeply detailed vistas that captured the attention of visitors. He
didn't do all this on his own. He had a
team of assistants who worked with him, and that is
where Degare fit in In addition to being an apparently
delightful party guest, Dgre was also a really hard worker. Yeah,
(08:10):
he did not ever shirk his work, and moreover, he
seemed to have an attitude of like I will learn
everything I can from my mentors. Uh. And he really
applied himself in every position he was in by all reports.
In eighteen ten, while Degare was still working for a
provost and he was twenty three at the time, he
married the twenty year old Louise Georgina Aerosmith. Her name
(08:33):
is English. That's because her parents were English, although she
was born and raised in France, and these two were
very much in love. This was a love match, and
when Louise's brother had a child out of wedlock, the
Digers raised her as their own daughter. Her name was
Marguerite Felicita. After almost ten years working under Provost, Degre
was offered and accepted a new job. That was chief
(08:56):
painter at the Theatre de l'ambigue Comique, and that job
to get elevated the production significantly. He didn't just create
backdrops that were far superior to what the theater had before,
he also introduced a new way to use them through
lighting design. He devised systems of lighting effects to create
convincing moonlight scenes, and when it came time to stage
(09:19):
the eruption of Mount Etna in a play titled La Belvedere,
the Gear created a sensation with his lighting design. This
spurred ticket sales for the theater. He became so recognized
as an asset for the theater that the Paris Opera
wanted to hire him, so for a couple of years
he was designing the scenery for both of those at
the same time. Yeah, this is such a striking development
(09:44):
because again, remember right like, they're doing all of this manually,
and at a time when it was like night has
fallen and all of the lights would be blown out
or all of the windows closed. He was like, no, no,
what if we find a way to do this subtly,
which is a complete shift. So all of this and
working for these two theater houses at the same time
(10:05):
kept Louis very busy, but he still had time to
think of new projects, and in eighteen twenty one he
partnered with an old friend and colleague who had worked
as an assistant to Pierre Prevost at the same time
that the Gear had That was a man named Charles
Marie Bouton and the two men had a plan to
launch a new entertainment venture that built on their knowledge
(10:26):
of panorama painting and incorporated the lighting expertise that the
Gear had acquired through his theater work. The two men
set up a limited stock company and they leased a
plot of land and they sold shares to investors to
fund their project. On July eleven, eight two, Bouton and
the Gear opened the Paris Diorama. This scenographic entertainment was
(10:49):
something completely new. That's who had to design a theater
to house and display what they're working on. It had
large scale images in common with the panorama, but it
offered entirely new spectacles for audiences to witness. And we're
going to talk more about what the diorama was and
how it was received in just a moment, but first
(11:10):
we'll pause for a quick sponsor break. So in the diorama,
scenes like landscapes and architectural views were painted in large
scale for audience viewing. But in this version they were
(11:30):
painted on linen so they would be translucent. Then lighting
effects were used to bring the painting seemingly to life
before the viewers eyes. This was again, remember before electrical
current was used in buildings by a number of decades,
so Degare had designed the theater to make use of
natural light. There were windows and skylights around the theater
(11:52):
that had shutters which could be operated manually to great effect.
To add to the illusion, there were sound effects. Sometimes
there would be an actor to fill out the image
in a three dimensional way. There wasn't any story in
play for these scenes. It was just the magical illusion
of feeling like you were sitting in a meadow by
a mountain side, or standing near a brook, or looking
(12:15):
out over the interior of Canterbury Cathedral from a high
up gallery. These scenes would last for ten or fifteen minutes,
and then a massive turntable would rotate the image away
and bring a second one interview that would be similarly
animated with light and other effects. Both the public and
critics really raved over the diorama. Some were said to
(12:37):
have been reluctant to except that they had been looking
at a two dimensional image that whole time. Yeah, there
was allegedly one woman who like asked to be led
down the steps of the cathedral and they're like, they're
not there. Uh. In less than a year, the business
had made back the money that it had cost to
open it and to operate it, and it started to
(12:57):
turn a profit. The next obvious step was to open
a second location, and that second one was in Regent's Park, London.
Because this had been a proven success already in Paris,
Bouton and de Geer had no trouble finding investors for
their second theater, and when it opened it was covered
extensively in the British press. On Septembree, the Morning Chronicle
(13:21):
of London ran a story that was simply titled the Diorama.
It read quote, the diorama, which has long been an
object of wonder and delight at Paris, is at length
established in this metropolis. A spacious building has been expressly
constructed for this exhibition in that part of the new
Road which adjoins Portland Place, at an expense which is
(13:43):
said to have exceeded ten thousand pounds. And on Saturday
a select number of visitors was admitted to a private
inspection previous to it being opened to the public. On
this day. There was also an assurance in the right
up to potential visitors that this was death Aly, a
very different thing than the panoramas, which had been popular
in London for years. At that point, it read quote
(14:06):
the diorama differs in this respect from the panorama that,
instead of a circular view of the objects represented, the
whole picture is seen at once in perspective. But it
differs from it still more essentially in the extraordinary fidelity
with which the objects are depicted, and in the completeness
of the optical illusion. Later on, after describing pretty much
(14:29):
every corner of the theater in detail, the journalist writes, quote,
in the diorama, everything contributes to favor the illusion. The
skill of the artist is the first thing which strikes
us in the panorama and the last in the diorama.
Both de Guerre and Bouton were made nights in the
French Legion of Honor by Louis eighteenth. Many dioramas popped
(14:51):
up in Europe and in North America after their success
in Paris and in London. These were run by other
operators who were hoping to cash in on the popularity
of the medium, but the original partners kept developing shows
in only their two theaters, and while the diorama business
was still growing, De Gear had begun to conduct experiments
(15:11):
in image capture. As early as eighteen twenty four, he
had set up a lab in the basement of the
Paris Diorama building so that he could pursue his fascination
with the field of photography, although it was of course
not called that yet. It didn't get that name until
eighteen thirty nine. He just knew he was trying to
capture light and use it to replicate the imagery of
(15:32):
the world around him. He did not seem to know
that a lot of other men had already been doing
the same thing for quite a while with no real success.
It makes sense that after creating the Diorama, the gear
would feel driven to find a new level of realism
to keep audiences buying tickets. Part of his drive was
probably the realization that Bhutan wasn't really interested in staying
(15:54):
with the diorama long term. To gar knew the success
of the business was totally up to him. Additionally, the
business had a lot of overhead. Every time a new
scene was staged had to be created from scratch, and
that was expensive. But if the gear didn't keep new
images rotating in audiences would just stop coming. He eventually
(16:17):
sold off his interest in the London location just to
keep his finances afloat, and according to friends and acquaintances,
none of whom were allowed to see what he was
up to. He was completely obsessed with his secret project.
His beloved wife Louise brought him food, but even she
was not allowed into the lab. He sometimes, again according
(16:38):
to friends, went for two to three days without leaving
that lab, often foregoing sleep for unhealthy long stretches as
he worked. He had been familiar with the camera obscura
for a while. For a refresher, this is a dark chamber,
either a room or a box, that has a tiny
hole to allow light in. Through that hole, an image
(16:59):
of whatever is outside of the chamber is projected onto
the opposite wall inverted. Camera obscura, which means dark chamber
in Latin, is a concept that's been around since antiquity,
so this was not a new technology when Degare was alive.
But he thought that somehow it could be used not
just to project images, but also to capture the light somehow.
(17:23):
Because Degare didn't really document what he was doing, but
also he probably didn't really know what he was doing
to be able to put it into words, we don't
have a lot of information about how this whole thing
played out for him. There were certainly experiments being done
by other men using chemistry to try to create images
with light, including the work of people like Jacques Charles,
(17:45):
who figured out that you could capture a person's silhouette
on paper by treating the paper with light sensitive chemicals
and then projecting the person's shadow onto it. But even
Charles's images were temporary. The entire paper would eventually darken
because it had been treated. The use of chemical processes
was also probably pretty challenging for de Gear thanks to
(18:06):
his inconsistent education in his early years. He really just
did not have a command of chemistry to start from.
But he did have access to optics expertise and the
associated equipment thanks to his friend Charles Chevalier. The Chevalier
family business was in producing various scientific equipment, including lenses,
(18:27):
so at least in that area the Gear had a
very steady supply. It was through Chevalier that made a
crucial connection that would finally give him a breakthrough. Nissa
four Nips sent his cousin to Chevalier's shop to purchase
a camera obscura. Nissa four Nips had been working on
a process to create pictures using sunlight since the eighteen teens.
(18:51):
He had used a camera to create a heliograph with
bitumen on paper in eighteen six, but that had needed
eight hours of exposure to work. Even with that eight hours,
it was kind of gauzy and faded in appearance, so
he was trying to improve on that. When he asked
about a new camera Obscura, Charles Chevalier got NIPS address,
(19:16):
gave it to Louis de Gere, who in turn reached
out to NIPS via a letter. Both of these men
were a bit cautious initially. De Gear did not want
to risk any potential business interest by giving away what
he had been working on, and the EPs was not
entirely clear who the gear was or how he had
gotten his address, and this letter out of the blue
(19:38):
seemed kind of rude and suspicious to him. It was
very forward. It would be like if a stranger called you,
Tracy and went like, hey, can I have your research
log ins at the following three place? And you would
be like him, excuse considering my response when I get
unsolicited PR pitches to a personal email address that I've
never publicized, I totally get this reaction, so the reply
(20:01):
that Nip sent was brief and it merely confirmed that, yes,
he had been doing some experiments along the lines of
what Digere was asking about. It took to Gere months
to reply, but when he did, he once again offended
Nips by asking for a sample of his experiments. Nips
knew that de Gare was the man behind the popular diorama,
(20:22):
so he started asking acquaintances in Paris if they knew him.
He found that the Gair had a reputation in the
art world for his talent and his work with light,
but Nips still only wrote him a short reply without
a sample. He said that he thought they were on
different paths. He's so polite he wouldn't leave it unanswered,
but he was kind of like, hey, go with God,
(20:43):
but I'm doing something else, whether out of genuine interest
or just desperation. Degare wrote him once more, and this
time he actually sent along a sample of his own work,
but he didn't know that Nieps had also reached sort
of breaking point where the family money was running out.
He had spent a lot on this effort, and he
(21:05):
too was hitting a dead end and not progressing any farther.
He still thought the Gear might not be trustworthy, but
he did reach out with the suggestion that quote it
should be of mutual interest to reciprocate our efforts to
attain the goal, and he sent a sample which the
gere sent him a pretty scathing critique of These two
(21:27):
men finally had a meeting in Paris in eight Understandably,
they remained pretty tentative with one another. Each was concerned
that he was lagging behind the other, but Niepp's described
having a pretty great time with the Gear, who had
given him a tour of the diorama. There was another
gap in their exchange due to the illness and death
(21:48):
of Nippe's brother Claude, but eventually the two of them
were writing to one another with regularity. It was not
until autumn of eighteen nine that the two officially entered
into a partnership, which had a ten year contract. So
we're going to talk about some of the details of
Nieps's progress in image capture after we first paused, and
here from the sponsors to keep stuff he missed in
(22:09):
history class going in his work, Niepp's had coated a
paper with silver chloride to capture an image from his
studio window of the landscape outside. This was what he
called heliography. Eventually he made a more permanent image from
(22:32):
that same window, this time on a pewter plate. He
wanted to make a printable plate, and he had also
managed to reproduce an engraved portrait with his process and
make two prints from it. Degare traveled to visit Niep's
and learned about how he had progressed, and he took
all of the information he learned back to Paris so
that he could do more experiments. But then in eighteen
(22:52):
thirty everything got complicated. The diorama was in financial trouble,
but Tom finally left the business entirely, and the July Revolution,
in which Charles the tenth was deposed and King Louis
Philippe took on the throne took the throne. That left
France in a tense time when letters that talked about
something like chemicals could easily be misconstrued as some kind
(23:15):
of revolutionary correspondence, so Digere and Nip stopped communicating. Things
were so financially tenuous that Digere wrote to the crown
to ask for a promotion to officer in the Legion
of honor. The thinking was that that would come with
a financial payment that would help to keep him from
his own financial ruin. But in the time that he
had free from working on the diorama, to try to
(23:37):
keep that going, the Gear learned Nipp's method of capturing images.
He wanted to see if he had any ideas for
how to move it forward. He and Nips were writing
to each other in codes so they could keep collaborating.
This was really a frantic time. Degre declared bankruptcy in
March of eighteen thirty two, but he and Nips kept working. Yeah.
(23:58):
Eventually they came up with a list to where they
gave chemicals number assignments, and they each had it so
they would just like use numbers in their letters, which
to me would look like a suspicious code. So Nieves
had used a bitumen coding that hardened when exposed to
light for some of his experiments, and the Gear came
(24:19):
up with a variation on that idea that used distilled
lavender oil to improve on the heliograph. That lavender oil
left a white residue in areas of the image where
light had hit it, and that created an improved image
than they had had before that, the duo called a
fis autotype. This was an improvement, but it wasn't really
a breakthrough, not at the level they needed, so they
(24:41):
kept working. I like to think that the smelled really nice,
I hope, so if nothing else, they could say the
studio smelled beautiful. Yeah, so the Gear shifted his work
back to using silver salts instead of a resin based
image capture. There's an apocryphal story about how he got
to his next breakthrough. In it, he had accidentally left
(25:04):
a spoon on an iodized plate and then later realized
that a perfect shadow of the spoon had been created
on the plate when the light hit it. So he
started to purposefully sensitize the silver on the plates that
they were using. He did this with iodine fumes. The
Gear is said to have shared this story verbally throughout
his life, but he never wrote it down. We don't
(25:26):
really know how accurate it is. Yeah, there's some questions
about how much that story may have changed in the tellings. Initially,
De Gear's work with iodine to sensitize plates did not
really return results, but he never got to share his
frustration about this with Niepps because Nissaford died suddenly in
July three after having a stroke, and this left to
(25:48):
Gear without the scientific expertise of his collaborator. But once
again he was tenacious and he kept at the work,
and an accident is again said to have given him
the next advancement it. De Gere is said to have
placed one of his polished silver coated plates into a
cupboard after having exposed it in a camera obscura. The
(26:09):
cupboard was a light proof chemical cupboard that was intended
for storing exposed plates, but he noticed when he returned
to the place roughly half an hour later, the image
that he had exposed in the camera obscure had already developed.
A thermometer had broken in the cupboard, and Louis de
get realized that mercury vapor was speeding the development. Yeah, again,
(26:31):
this is apocryphal, so in some versions of it you'll
see that he left it overnight, frustrated that it had
not initially developed. But regardless, this was a huge step forward.
But the process was still not solid, and that is
mostly because the images themselves were not. Permanence of those
images remained a problem. Those plates would just keep developing
(26:53):
over time, and the image would be lost, so they
would just like keep having more details until they us
became a big blob. Eventually, de Gere figured that problem
out as well. It was merely a matter of stopping
the developing process by removing the excess silver iodide from
the plate. Geary used a salt solution of sodium thiosulfate
(27:15):
to do this. So the system for making what would
be called a de Gara type was one polish a
silver coated copper plate to sensitize the plate with iodine
fumes and place it in a light tight plate. Three,
slide that plate into the camera obscura, and then slide
the light tight covering open. Four exposed that for some
(27:38):
number of minutes, and that was variable depending on the
light and the camera obscura and the concentration of the
chemicals were that were used. So this required some experience
and know how of the person who was who was
trying to make the image. Step five developed the image
in mercury vapor, and step six stop the development process
with a salt based solution. The first public mention of
(28:01):
the Gear's work actually appeared in eighteen thirty five, several
years before like the Big release about it. That wasn't
an article in the Journal des Artiste that was about
new shows at the Diorama. It wasn't about image capture
at all. But at the end of the write up,
which had no attribution as to its author and has
even made some people question whether maybe Degare wrote this himself,
(28:24):
there was the following paragraph quote he has discovered, we
are told the means of collecting on a plate prepared
by him, the image produced by a camera obscura in
such a way that a portrait, a landscape, or any
view projected on this plate by an ordinary camera obscura
leaves its impression in light and shade, and this presents
(28:44):
the most perfect of all drawings. A preparation applied to
this image preserves it for an indefinite time. Physical science
has perhaps never presented a wonder comparable to this one.
This was a considerable announcement it, but nothing much seems
to have been said about it for the entire year.
(29:05):
But then architect Alphonse Eugene Hubert wrote a response that
amounted to basically, I seriously doubt it. He had been
trying to capture camera obscure images as well, but had
not had any luck, so to him, it seemed highly
unlikely that de Gare, who did not have a scientific background,
could have managed it. By eight thirty seven, Degare had
(29:26):
tested and replicated his process enough times that it was
set he could always get consistent results. As with other
aspects of his work that we don't really know what
that process of testing and refinement was like. We have
no idea, truly no idea the manner in which he
arrived at realizing each step along the way was the
(29:47):
correct one. We do know his process was different from
all of the other photographic processes that were in development
by other people that we're having problems. The Academy of
Sciences heard a presentation that laid out exactly how Degere's
process worked on January seventh, eighteen thirty nine. That lecture
was not given by the gear but by Francois Arago.
(30:09):
The get couldn't do it. He had felt ill, or
at least he claimed he did. We don't know he
at least he said he felt ill. He may have
had nerves, and that is why an astronomer first explained
photography at the Academy of Sciences. But to Gere had
decided to name this process after himself, of course, and
that was something that really bothered Nicephor Nieppe's son Isidor,
(30:32):
who felt that his father should really be recognized. But
to Get really thought that he had changed the approach
so much from the heliograph work that Niepps had done
that the name shift was warranted, and in a revised
version of the contract that he had originally agreed to
you with Nieppe's to Get offered his former partners family
financial rights to half of the money made from de
(30:54):
Gara typing and the promise that Niepps's name would always
be included informal and nown sns is adorney Epps signed
this new deal. In terms of making money from this work,
Louis de get took an interesting approach. He knew from
his experience with the diorama that imitators would pop up
as soon as he filed for a patent, and in
(31:15):
France at the time, there was really not much that
could be done about it, so instead he sold it
to the French government, and in turn, the French government
released it free to the world as a gift on
August nine, eighteen thirty nine. As part of the sale
to the government, the Garret had arranged for annual payments
to be made to both himself and Niepps's family. The
(31:37):
Garret got six thousand francs a year and Nip's Air's
got four thousand. The gear did manage to patent his
process in England, Ireland and Scotland before the French government
released it, so he maintained his rights there and in
their colonies. Yeah, he did try for a while some
other business sort of plans to try to make money
(31:58):
off of this, but none of those were really working out,
which is why he sold it to the government. As
the dagaratype took on a life of its own and
the field of photography continued to advance through other inventors
improving upon it, degar retired again. He was financially set.
A fire destroyed a lot of his early work in
eighteen thirty nine and he did not rebuild his burnt
(32:20):
studio after that. He did give some presentations and lessons
on occasion, but according to most people, he was actually
kind of shy, particularly about talking about his achievement, and
all he really wanted to do was go back to painting,
and he did a lot of that in his later years.
During the eighteen forties, he painted a number of huge
pieces for churches in Paris. Louis de Geer died of
(32:42):
a heart attack on July tenth, eighteen fifty one, at
his home in Risumron, just outside of Paris, and the
time between the announcement of the Dagara type and his death,
other innovators had come up with new ways to capture
imagery with light. That included William Henry Fox Talbot, who
patented a paper negative process, the calotype. In eighteen forty one,
(33:05):
the Garatt type studios opened in Europe and the United States,
and to photography journals were launched. In the US they
were the Dagarian Art Journal and the Photographic Art Journal,
and then, immediately before his death, starting in May of
eighteen fifty one, a d Garo type exhibition had been
mounted at the Great Exhibition of London, which is another
thing that comes up a lot um. Also, Hey, surprise,
(33:29):
this is the first of a sort of two parter
that we're doing on early photography. Uh. They are standalone episodes,
but their linked thematically. And on an upcoming episode we
are going to discuss one of the people who took
to gears new technology and kind of ran with it. Oh,
do Gear, do you have some listener mail before we
(33:49):
head out? I do. This is from our listener. I
don't know if she pronounces it Andrea or Andrea, so
either way, thank you who is writing about our Pranks episode? Right,
it's good afternoon. I've been listening to the podcast since
around and I was delighted to hear the Three Legendary
Pranks podcast, especially the spaghetti Harvest prank. Normally, I am
(34:10):
not a fan of pranks, since it seems most are
mean spirited and make an unsuspecting person a butt of
the joke. But I truly appreciate the pranks that are
meant to amuse a person and brighten their day. I
teach middle school math. Okay, sidebar, thank you for being
an educator. That is a hard job already. Wow, what
a time you've had, which she's going to talk about
in the rest of her letter. She says, leading up
to April Fool's Day, I saw some discourse in various
(34:33):
teacher groups on Facebook about fun pranks to give a
good laugh to students learning online and going through a
traumatic global event. One teacher posted that she had played
the marshmallow farming video for her students in the past,
and they got a good laugh. This video is hilarious.
It is very similar to the Spaghetti Trees, except it
is a North Carolina farmer talking about how the wet
(34:57):
climate has created a problem where the marshmallows have melted
and fallen off the trees, and it is similarly given
with complete seriousness. It's great. In my class online update
for the day, on April fools Day twenty I posted
an update telling my students they needed to watch the
marshmallow farming video and that there would be an ungraded
quiz to review into JR operations using the numbers in
(35:20):
the video. When they actually clicked through to the quiz,
I let students in on the joke and I asked
them not to spoil the joke for their friends, and
I wish them a joyful April Fools Day. The feedback
I got was perfect. Some of them got the joke
right away and loved it. Others I had going for
a while, and yet others questioned my sanity until a
friend told them it was a joke. This year, on
(35:41):
April Fools Day, when I had all of my students
again for the next year of math, we fondly reminisced
and had another laugh. Uh. Shelsa writes. Also another brief
story related to your Alistair Crowley episode. I learned of
Alistair Crowley in my late teens when I became a
huge fan of David Bowie. Bowie referred to the Golden
Dawn and Crowley in his lyrics for quicksand I was
(36:01):
excited to hear Bowie's name mentioned in the podcast. I
am also including pictures of my black cat Natasha, my
tricolor Tabby Millie, I rescued from a cat horder on
the last day of school, in my meanest and favorite
hen pecking at my toes, my dog Ziggy sitting on
the picnic table in our backyard while I read, and
my dog Daisy basking in the sun. I hope you
(36:21):
both have a wonderful holiday season full of light and blessings. Cheers. Oh.
I love this email. One. I love it because it
gives the chance to thank educators too. That is a
great way to pull prank that is fun and joyful.
And three, that marshmallow video is funny. I haven't to
do it later. It's very very funny, and I love
(36:44):
love this collection of beautiful creatures, and I do understand
loving the meanest animals the most. I don't know what
it is, there's something in my heart I do the
same thing. So thank you, thank you, because this was
an absolutely oh and she says Andrea. Um, so yeah,
that's Andrea. I said it wrong every time. I only
just noticed the phonetics at the very end. I've done
(37:07):
this exact same thing with reading listener mail before. Yes. Uh.
The problem is that I read it from their email
address at the top, and then when I scrolled down
and see the thing, my brain goes, oh whoops. Yeah, well,
and my apologies. I've read the whole email, including that note,
(37:27):
but then I have recorded a whole podcast episode and
the note is not in my mind anymore. That is
precisely what has just taken place. So thank you Andrea
for writing us that, because it was absolutely a delight.
If you would like to write to us and give
me the chance to mess up the pronunciation of your name,
you can do that at History podcast at iHeart radio
(37:47):
dot com. Please forgive me if I do it. You
can also touch based on the podcast on social media
at mist in History, and if you have not subscribed.
You can do that on the I heart Radio app
or anywhere you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
(38:10):
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart
radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. You have
probably noticed that there's a name that pops up pretty
much anytime we're discussing photography in history, and that is Dgear.
(00:26):
We have referenced him and his Dagara types and the
invention of that many times on the show, and we
often use it as a reference point for when other
people are taking pictures and how far along they've come.
We're probably going to reference it again because he really
innovated and touched a lot of lives. But well before
he figured out how to capture images through a camera obscura,
(00:48):
he was an artist and an innovator and entertainment. So
today we're going to talk about all of that because
we've never covered him before, and of course we will
also talk about his work in photography. Is one of
those people that has come up so many times that
we had to have the conversation about whether we had
already done this episode. Yes, Tracy, are you sure we
have a covered to get I just looked through the
(01:10):
whole spreadsheet. Not in there, so He was born Louis
Jacques Monde Dagure on November eighteenth seven, about a hundred
and eighty kilometers west of Paris, in a town called
the Family, especially to Get's father, who was named Louis.
They were royalists in their politics, and Louis had a
(01:33):
sister who even was named after Marie Antoinette. That sister
was born in seventeen nine one. The senior Louis de
Guer worked as a court crier before the revolution, and
that was a civil service job, but as the French
Revolution really heated up, that job, of course went away
for a while. That meant that the family moved to Orleans,
(01:55):
where Louis Senior found work as a clerk in an estate,
and in seventeen nine d three, of course, Louis the
sixteenth was guillotined and the Reign of Terror began. Degere's
father was employed by Louis Philippe, the second Duke dor Leon,
who sided with the revolution, but he was of course
a cousin of the king, and he was eventually guillotined
(02:16):
for his association with the House of Bourbon. And though
Louis da Sr. Remained employed at the estate, this seems
to have pretty much meant that life in Orleans was
a little bit more somber than it had been when
the family first arrived there. There are some holes in
the story of de Gere's early life. Some of that
(02:38):
is just because it would have been unusual for just
a regular child's life to be well documented, but it's
also because of the period in which he was born.
So consider, for example, he would have still been basically
a baby, not even two years old, when the Bastille
was stormed in seventeen nine, so his whole childhood was
happening at a time when the monarchy was falling, revolution
(03:00):
was raging. That all would have been very difficult for
his royalist father, and it also would have meant that
a lot of just so called normal life was significantly disrupted.
So we know that Louis Dag was enrolled in public
school in Orleans, but due to those constantly shifting sands
of the French government, there were stretches, long stretches sometimes
(03:24):
where classes did not assemble, so Dag got something of
a patchwork education. But he spent that ample free time
that he was afforded by the gaps in school to
develop his natural talent, which was drawing. While Louis de
Gre's name is forever linked to photography, he really did
not start out on a career path that would suggest
(03:45):
that outcome. In eighteen hundred, Louis de ge drew a
portrait of his parents. This was sort of an audition.
The skill that he exhibited with this portrait led to
him being offered an apprenticeship, not exactly with an artist,
though it was with an architect. This was a stable
career path for an artistic thirteen year old in a
(04:07):
time when France really did not have that many stable
career paths. So for three years he dutifully works at
perfecting his ability to render the drawings of building structures.
That's something he seems to have really enjoyed. He loved
recreating true life detail in his drawing, and architectural drawings
were to him just another iteration of that. Now, as
(04:29):
a note, this is something that I stumbled across a
lot while researching this episode. You will sometimes see it
mentioned in biographical writeups of de Gere that he also
worked as a revenue officer during this early period of
his life, without much additional information about it, and it
kind of seems like this might actually be the result
(04:49):
of some confusion due to his name being the same
as his father's, and since we know that his father
did work as a clerk at an estate, that kind
of seems like the most likely scenario. When the younger
Louis de Gare finished his apprenticeship at the age of sixteen,
he didn't take the next step into architecture. Instead, he
went back to his love of art. He decided to
(05:11):
move to Paris to study painting and to try to
make a life as an artist. This was something that
his parents found terrifying. They had supported his artistic tendencies,
but there was just uncertainty and a lack of stability
in an art career, and then, on top of that,
they were also concerned that the young de Gere would
fall into a life of debauchery in Paris. Finally, after
(05:34):
a lot of discussion, they made an arrangement that was
agreeable to the parents, and the son alike Louise father
got him an apprenticeship in Paris with Ignacio Eugeno. Maria
Degatti and Degatti was born and tour in Italy in
seventeen fifty eight, and, like young Louis, de Gare. He
showed artistic proclivity from a very young age, and he
(05:56):
too had moved to Paris to pursue his art. Although
he and so when he was in his thirties, and
by the time his life met up with Digres, he
had become a renowned theatrical designer and a painter for
the Paris Opera, and de Gare moved in with him
as part of this apprenticeship deal. That was something his
parents insisted upon. This was a time in his life
(06:17):
when Louis de Gare lived a pretty enviable existence. He
was young, he was making connections in the Paris art scene,
and he made the most of that. There are stories
about how much fun he was at parties and how
he would go into such gatherings walking on his hands.
He loved Paris, and Paris loved him back. He was
really beloved among his peers. At one point he even
(06:40):
appeared on stage and a small role in the Paris Opera. Yeah,
there was one section of a biography about him I
was reading where it said that he knew how to
walk a tight rope, and that he may have learned
this when he was a young boy. Because festivals would
come through the area where they lived, and I'm like, yes,
but how did that come up while he's just hanging
(07:03):
out with his friends, Like, oh, would you like to
see me? What walk this tyrope that just happens to
be here at present? That's a little less clear, but
he had a lot of fun skills, it sounds like.
And just as he had spent three years as an
architect's apprentice, he spent three years under Degatti's tutelage before
deciding that he wanted to move on. And this was
(07:24):
a pretty natural progression because his next move was to
take on an assistant ship with another artist, and this
time it was Pierre Provost, famed panorama painter. Panoramas are
enormous paintings. They were mounted in circular rooms and intended
to be viewed from a central viewing platform. They had
made their debut in London in and then Paris had
(07:47):
quickly embraced this medium, and Provost really excelled at creating
deeply detailed vistas that captured the attention of visitors. He
didn't do all this on his own. He had a
team of assistants who worked with him, and that is
where Degare fit in In addition to being an apparently
delightful party guest, Dgre was also a really hard worker. Yeah,
(08:10):
he did not ever shirk his work, and moreover, he
seemed to have an attitude of like I will learn
everything I can from my mentors. Uh. And he really
applied himself in every position he was in by all reports.
In eighteen ten, while Degare was still working for a
provost and he was twenty three at the time, he
married the twenty year old Louise Georgina Aerosmith. Her name
(08:33):
is English. That's because her parents were English, although she
was born and raised in France, and these two were
very much in love. This was a love match, and
when Louise's brother had a child out of wedlock, the
Digers raised her as their own daughter. Her name was
Marguerite Felicita. After almost ten years working under Provost, Degre
was offered and accepted a new job. That was chief
(08:56):
painter at the Theatre de l'ambigue Comique, and that job
to get elevated the production significantly. He didn't just create
backdrops that were far superior to what the theater had before,
he also introduced a new way to use them through
lighting design. He devised systems of lighting effects to create
convincing moonlight scenes, and when it came time to stage
(09:19):
the eruption of Mount Etna in a play titled La Belvedere,
the Gear created a sensation with his lighting design. This
spurred ticket sales for the theater. He became so recognized
as an asset for the theater that the Paris Opera
wanted to hire him, so for a couple of years
he was designing the scenery for both of those at
the same time. Yeah, this is such a striking development
(09:44):
because again, remember right like, they're doing all of this manually,
and at a time when it was like night has
fallen and all of the lights would be blown out
or all of the windows closed. He was like, no, no,
what if we find a way to do this subtly,
which is a complete shift. So all of this and
working for these two theater houses at the same time
(10:05):
kept Louis very busy, but he still had time to
think of new projects, and in eighteen twenty one he
partnered with an old friend and colleague who had worked
as an assistant to Pierre Prevost at the same time
that the Gear had That was a man named Charles
Marie Bouton and the two men had a plan to
launch a new entertainment venture that built on their knowledge
(10:26):
of panorama painting and incorporated the lighting expertise that the
Gear had acquired through his theater work. The two men
set up a limited stock company and they leased a
plot of land and they sold shares to investors to
fund their project. On July eleven, eight two, Bouton and
the Gear opened the Paris Diorama. This scenographic entertainment was
(10:49):
something completely new. That's who had to design a theater
to house and display what they're working on. It had
large scale images in common with the panorama, but it
offered entirely new spectacles for audiences to witness. And we're
going to talk more about what the diorama was and
how it was received in just a moment, but first
(11:10):
we'll pause for a quick sponsor break. So in the diorama,
scenes like landscapes and architectural views were painted in large
scale for audience viewing. But in this version they were
(11:30):
painted on linen so they would be translucent. Then lighting
effects were used to bring the painting seemingly to life
before the viewers eyes. This was again, remember before electrical
current was used in buildings by a number of decades,
so Degare had designed the theater to make use of
natural light. There were windows and skylights around the theater
(11:52):
that had shutters which could be operated manually to great effect.
To add to the illusion, there were sound effects. Sometimes
there would be an actor to fill out the image
in a three dimensional way. There wasn't any story in
play for these scenes. It was just the magical illusion
of feeling like you were sitting in a meadow by
a mountain side, or standing near a brook, or looking
(12:15):
out over the interior of Canterbury Cathedral from a high
up gallery. These scenes would last for ten or fifteen minutes,
and then a massive turntable would rotate the image away
and bring a second one interview that would be similarly
animated with light and other effects. Both the public and
critics really raved over the diorama. Some were said to
(12:37):
have been reluctant to except that they had been looking
at a two dimensional image that whole time. Yeah, there
was allegedly one woman who like asked to be led
down the steps of the cathedral and they're like, they're
not there. Uh. In less than a year, the business
had made back the money that it had cost to
open it and to operate it, and it started to
(12:57):
turn a profit. The next obvious step was to open
a second location, and that second one was in Regent's Park, London.
Because this had been a proven success already in Paris,
Bouton and de Geer had no trouble finding investors for
their second theater, and when it opened it was covered
extensively in the British press. On Septembree, the Morning Chronicle
(13:21):
of London ran a story that was simply titled the Diorama.
It read quote, the diorama, which has long been an
object of wonder and delight at Paris, is at length
established in this metropolis. A spacious building has been expressly
constructed for this exhibition in that part of the new
Road which adjoins Portland Place, at an expense which is
(13:43):
said to have exceeded ten thousand pounds. And on Saturday
a select number of visitors was admitted to a private
inspection previous to it being opened to the public. On
this day. There was also an assurance in the right
up to potential visitors that this was death Aly, a
very different thing than the panoramas, which had been popular
in London for years. At that point, it read quote
(14:06):
the diorama differs in this respect from the panorama that,
instead of a circular view of the objects represented, the
whole picture is seen at once in perspective. But it
differs from it still more essentially in the extraordinary fidelity
with which the objects are depicted, and in the completeness
of the optical illusion. Later on, after describing pretty much
(14:29):
every corner of the theater in detail, the journalist writes, quote,
in the diorama, everything contributes to favor the illusion. The
skill of the artist is the first thing which strikes
us in the panorama and the last in the diorama.
Both de Guerre and Bouton were made nights in the
French Legion of Honor by Louis eighteenth. Many dioramas popped
(14:51):
up in Europe and in North America after their success
in Paris and in London. These were run by other
operators who were hoping to cash in on the popularity
of the medium, but the original partners kept developing shows
in only their two theaters, and while the diorama business
was still growing, De Gear had begun to conduct experiments
(15:11):
in image capture. As early as eighteen twenty four, he
had set up a lab in the basement of the
Paris Diorama building so that he could pursue his fascination
with the field of photography, although it was of course
not called that yet. It didn't get that name until
eighteen thirty nine. He just knew he was trying to
capture light and use it to replicate the imagery of
(15:32):
the world around him. He did not seem to know
that a lot of other men had already been doing
the same thing for quite a while with no real success.
It makes sense that after creating the Diorama, the gear
would feel driven to find a new level of realism
to keep audiences buying tickets. Part of his drive was
probably the realization that Bhutan wasn't really interested in staying
(15:54):
with the diorama long term. To gar knew the success
of the business was totally up to him. Additionally, the
business had a lot of overhead. Every time a new
scene was staged had to be created from scratch, and
that was expensive. But if the gear didn't keep new
images rotating in audiences would just stop coming. He eventually
(16:17):
sold off his interest in the London location just to
keep his finances afloat, and according to friends and acquaintances,
none of whom were allowed to see what he was
up to. He was completely obsessed with his secret project.
His beloved wife Louise brought him food, but even she
was not allowed into the lab. He sometimes, again according
(16:38):
to friends, went for two to three days without leaving
that lab, often foregoing sleep for unhealthy long stretches as
he worked. He had been familiar with the camera obscura
for a while. For a refresher, this is a dark chamber,
either a room or a box, that has a tiny
hole to allow light in. Through that hole, an image
(16:59):
of whatever is outside of the chamber is projected onto
the opposite wall inverted. Camera obscura, which means dark chamber
in Latin, is a concept that's been around since antiquity,
so this was not a new technology when Degare was alive.
But he thought that somehow it could be used not
just to project images, but also to capture the light somehow.
(17:23):
Because Degare didn't really document what he was doing, but
also he probably didn't really know what he was doing
to be able to put it into words, we don't
have a lot of information about how this whole thing
played out for him. There were certainly experiments being done
by other men using chemistry to try to create images
with light, including the work of people like Jacques Charles,
(17:45):
who figured out that you could capture a person's silhouette
on paper by treating the paper with light sensitive chemicals
and then projecting the person's shadow onto it. But even
Charles's images were temporary. The entire paper would eventually darken
because it had been treated. The use of chemical processes
was also probably pretty challenging for de Gear thanks to
(18:06):
his inconsistent education in his early years. He really just
did not have a command of chemistry to start from.
But he did have access to optics expertise and the
associated equipment thanks to his friend Charles Chevalier. The Chevalier
family business was in producing various scientific equipment, including lenses,
(18:27):
so at least in that area the Gear had a
very steady supply. It was through Chevalier that made a
crucial connection that would finally give him a breakthrough. Nissa
four Nips sent his cousin to Chevalier's shop to purchase
a camera obscura. Nissa four Nips had been working on
a process to create pictures using sunlight since the eighteen teens.
(18:51):
He had used a camera to create a heliograph with
bitumen on paper in eighteen six, but that had needed
eight hours of exposure to work. Even with that eight hours,
it was kind of gauzy and faded in appearance, so
he was trying to improve on that. When he asked
about a new camera Obscura, Charles Chevalier got NIPS address,
(19:16):
gave it to Louis de Gere, who in turn reached
out to NIPS via a letter. Both of these men
were a bit cautious initially. De Gear did not want
to risk any potential business interest by giving away what
he had been working on, and the EPs was not
entirely clear who the gear was or how he had
gotten his address, and this letter out of the blue
(19:38):
seemed kind of rude and suspicious to him. It was
very forward. It would be like if a stranger called you,
Tracy and went like, hey, can I have your research
log ins at the following three place? And you would
be like him, excuse considering my response when I get
unsolicited PR pitches to a personal email address that I've
never publicized, I totally get this reaction, so the reply
(20:01):
that Nip sent was brief and it merely confirmed that, yes,
he had been doing some experiments along the lines of
what Digere was asking about. It took to Gere months
to reply, but when he did, he once again offended
Nips by asking for a sample of his experiments. Nips
knew that de Gare was the man behind the popular diorama,
(20:22):
so he started asking acquaintances in Paris if they knew him.
He found that the Gair had a reputation in the
art world for his talent and his work with light,
but Nips still only wrote him a short reply without
a sample. He said that he thought they were on
different paths. He's so polite he wouldn't leave it unanswered,
but he was kind of like, hey, go with God,
(20:43):
but I'm doing something else, whether out of genuine interest
or just desperation. Degare wrote him once more, and this
time he actually sent along a sample of his own work,
but he didn't know that Nieps had also reached sort
of breaking point where the family money was running out.
He had spent a lot on this effort, and he
(21:05):
too was hitting a dead end and not progressing any farther.
He still thought the Gear might not be trustworthy, but
he did reach out with the suggestion that quote it
should be of mutual interest to reciprocate our efforts to
attain the goal, and he sent a sample which the
gere sent him a pretty scathing critique of These two
(21:27):
men finally had a meeting in Paris in eight Understandably,
they remained pretty tentative with one another. Each was concerned
that he was lagging behind the other, but Niepp's described
having a pretty great time with the Gear, who had
given him a tour of the diorama. There was another
gap in their exchange due to the illness and death
(21:48):
of Nippe's brother Claude, but eventually the two of them
were writing to one another with regularity. It was not
until autumn of eighteen nine that the two officially entered
into a partnership, which had a ten year contract. So
we're going to talk about some of the details of
Nieps's progress in image capture after we first paused, and
here from the sponsors to keep stuff he missed in
(22:09):
history class going in his work, Niepp's had coated a
paper with silver chloride to capture an image from his
studio window of the landscape outside. This was what he
called heliography. Eventually he made a more permanent image from
(22:32):
that same window, this time on a pewter plate. He
wanted to make a printable plate, and he had also
managed to reproduce an engraved portrait with his process and
make two prints from it. Degare traveled to visit Niep's
and learned about how he had progressed, and he took
all of the information he learned back to Paris so
that he could do more experiments. But then in eighteen
(22:52):
thirty everything got complicated. The diorama was in financial trouble,
but Tom finally left the business entirely, and the July Revolution,
in which Charles the tenth was deposed and King Louis
Philippe took on the throne took the throne. That left
France in a tense time when letters that talked about
something like chemicals could easily be misconstrued as some kind
(23:15):
of revolutionary correspondence, so Digere and Nip stopped communicating. Things
were so financially tenuous that Digere wrote to the crown
to ask for a promotion to officer in the Legion
of honor. The thinking was that that would come with
a financial payment that would help to keep him from
his own financial ruin. But in the time that he
had free from working on the diorama, to try to
(23:37):
keep that going, the Gear learned Nipp's method of capturing images.
He wanted to see if he had any ideas for
how to move it forward. He and Nips were writing
to each other in codes so they could keep collaborating.
This was really a frantic time. Degre declared bankruptcy in
March of eighteen thirty two, but he and Nips kept working. Yeah.
(23:58):
Eventually they came up with a list to where they
gave chemicals number assignments, and they each had it so
they would just like use numbers in their letters, which
to me would look like a suspicious code. So Nieves
had used a bitumen coding that hardened when exposed to
light for some of his experiments, and the Gear came
(24:19):
up with a variation on that idea that used distilled
lavender oil to improve on the heliograph. That lavender oil
left a white residue in areas of the image where
light had hit it, and that created an improved image
than they had had before that, the duo called a
fis autotype. This was an improvement, but it wasn't really
a breakthrough, not at the level they needed, so they
(24:41):
kept working. I like to think that the smelled really nice,
I hope, so if nothing else, they could say the
studio smelled beautiful. Yeah, so the Gear shifted his work
back to using silver salts instead of a resin based
image capture. There's an apocryphal story about how he got
to his next breakthrough. In it, he had accidentally left
(25:04):
a spoon on an iodized plate and then later realized
that a perfect shadow of the spoon had been created
on the plate when the light hit it. So he
started to purposefully sensitize the silver on the plates that
they were using. He did this with iodine fumes. The
Gear is said to have shared this story verbally throughout
his life, but he never wrote it down. We don't
(25:26):
really know how accurate it is. Yeah, there's some questions
about how much that story may have changed in the tellings. Initially,
De Gear's work with iodine to sensitize plates did not
really return results, but he never got to share his
frustration about this with Niepps because Nissaford died suddenly in
July three after having a stroke, and this left to
(25:48):
Gear without the scientific expertise of his collaborator. But once
again he was tenacious and he kept at the work,
and an accident is again said to have given him
the next advancement it. De Gere is said to have
placed one of his polished silver coated plates into a
cupboard after having exposed it in a camera obscura. The
(26:09):
cupboard was a light proof chemical cupboard that was intended
for storing exposed plates, but he noticed when he returned
to the place roughly half an hour later, the image
that he had exposed in the camera obscure had already developed.
A thermometer had broken in the cupboard, and Louis de
get realized that mercury vapor was speeding the development. Yeah, again,
(26:31):
this is apocryphal, so in some versions of it you'll
see that he left it overnight, frustrated that it had
not initially developed. But regardless, this was a huge step forward.
But the process was still not solid, and that is
mostly because the images themselves were not. Permanence of those
images remained a problem. Those plates would just keep developing
(26:53):
over time, and the image would be lost, so they
would just like keep having more details until they us
became a big blob. Eventually, de Gere figured that problem
out as well. It was merely a matter of stopping
the developing process by removing the excess silver iodide from
the plate. Geary used a salt solution of sodium thiosulfate
(27:15):
to do this. So the system for making what would
be called a de Gara type was one polish a
silver coated copper plate to sensitize the plate with iodine
fumes and place it in a light tight plate. Three,
slide that plate into the camera obscura, and then slide
the light tight covering open. Four exposed that for some
(27:38):
number of minutes, and that was variable depending on the
light and the camera obscura and the concentration of the
chemicals were that were used. So this required some experience
and know how of the person who was who was
trying to make the image. Step five developed the image
in mercury vapor, and step six stop the development process
with a salt based solution. The first public mention of
(28:01):
the Gear's work actually appeared in eighteen thirty five, several
years before like the Big release about it. That wasn't
an article in the Journal des Artiste that was about
new shows at the Diorama. It wasn't about image capture
at all. But at the end of the write up,
which had no attribution as to its author and has
even made some people question whether maybe Degare wrote this himself,
(28:24):
there was the following paragraph quote he has discovered, we
are told the means of collecting on a plate prepared
by him, the image produced by a camera obscura in
such a way that a portrait, a landscape, or any
view projected on this plate by an ordinary camera obscura
leaves its impression in light and shade, and this presents
(28:44):
the most perfect of all drawings. A preparation applied to
this image preserves it for an indefinite time. Physical science
has perhaps never presented a wonder comparable to this one.
This was a considerable announcement it, but nothing much seems
to have been said about it for the entire year.
(29:05):
But then architect Alphonse Eugene Hubert wrote a response that
amounted to basically, I seriously doubt it. He had been
trying to capture camera obscure images as well, but had
not had any luck, so to him, it seemed highly
unlikely that de Gare, who did not have a scientific background,
could have managed it. By eight thirty seven, Degare had
(29:26):
tested and replicated his process enough times that it was
set he could always get consistent results. As with other
aspects of his work that we don't really know what
that process of testing and refinement was like. We have
no idea, truly no idea the manner in which he
arrived at realizing each step along the way was the
(29:47):
correct one. We do know his process was different from
all of the other photographic processes that were in development
by other people that we're having problems. The Academy of
Sciences heard a presentation that laid out exactly how Degere's
process worked on January seventh, eighteen thirty nine. That lecture
was not given by the gear but by Francois Arago.
(30:09):
The get couldn't do it. He had felt ill, or
at least he claimed he did. We don't know he
at least he said he felt ill. He may have
had nerves, and that is why an astronomer first explained
photography at the Academy of Sciences. But to Gere had
decided to name this process after himself, of course, and
that was something that really bothered Nicephor Nieppe's son Isidor,
(30:32):
who felt that his father should really be recognized. But
to Get really thought that he had changed the approach
so much from the heliograph work that Niepps had done
that the name shift was warranted, and in a revised
version of the contract that he had originally agreed to
you with Nieppe's to Get offered his former partners family
financial rights to half of the money made from de
(30:54):
Gara typing and the promise that Niepps's name would always
be included informal and nown sns is adorney Epps signed
this new deal. In terms of making money from this work,
Louis de get took an interesting approach. He knew from
his experience with the diorama that imitators would pop up
as soon as he filed for a patent, and in
(31:15):
France at the time, there was really not much that
could be done about it, so instead he sold it
to the French government, and in turn, the French government
released it free to the world as a gift on
August nine, eighteen thirty nine. As part of the sale
to the government, the Garret had arranged for annual payments
to be made to both himself and Niepps's family. The
(31:37):
Garret got six thousand francs a year and Nip's Air's
got four thousand. The gear did manage to patent his
process in England, Ireland and Scotland before the French government
released it, so he maintained his rights there and in
their colonies. Yeah, he did try for a while some
other business sort of plans to try to make money
(31:58):
off of this, but none of those were really working out,
which is why he sold it to the government. As
the dagaratype took on a life of its own and
the field of photography continued to advance through other inventors
improving upon it, degar retired again. He was financially set.
A fire destroyed a lot of his early work in
eighteen thirty nine and he did not rebuild his burnt
(32:20):
studio after that. He did give some presentations and lessons
on occasion, but according to most people, he was actually
kind of shy, particularly about talking about his achievement, and
all he really wanted to do was go back to painting,
and he did a lot of that in his later years.
During the eighteen forties, he painted a number of huge
pieces for churches in Paris. Louis de Geer died of
(32:42):
a heart attack on July tenth, eighteen fifty one, at
his home in Risumron, just outside of Paris, and the
time between the announcement of the Dagara type and his death,
other innovators had come up with new ways to capture
imagery with light. That included William Henry Fox Talbot, who
patented a paper negative process, the calotype. In eighteen forty one,
(33:05):
the Garatt type studios opened in Europe and the United States,
and to photography journals were launched. In the US they
were the Dagarian Art Journal and the Photographic Art Journal,
and then, immediately before his death, starting in May of
eighteen fifty one, a d Garo type exhibition had been
mounted at the Great Exhibition of London, which is another
thing that comes up a lot um. Also, Hey, surprise,
(33:29):
this is the first of a sort of two parter
that we're doing on early photography. Uh. They are standalone episodes,
but their linked thematically. And on an upcoming episode we
are going to discuss one of the people who took
to gears new technology and kind of ran with it. Oh,
do Gear, do you have some listener mail before we
(33:49):
head out? I do. This is from our listener. I
don't know if she pronounces it Andrea or Andrea, so
either way, thank you who is writing about our Pranks episode? Right,
it's good afternoon. I've been listening to the podcast since
around and I was delighted to hear the Three Legendary
Pranks podcast, especially the spaghetti Harvest prank. Normally, I am
(34:10):
not a fan of pranks, since it seems most are
mean spirited and make an unsuspecting person a butt of
the joke. But I truly appreciate the pranks that are
meant to amuse a person and brighten their day. I
teach middle school math. Okay, sidebar, thank you for being
an educator. That is a hard job already. Wow, what
a time you've had, which she's going to talk about
in the rest of her letter. She says, leading up
to April Fool's Day, I saw some discourse in various
(34:33):
teacher groups on Facebook about fun pranks to give a
good laugh to students learning online and going through a
traumatic global event. One teacher posted that she had played
the marshmallow farming video for her students in the past,
and they got a good laugh. This video is hilarious.
It is very similar to the Spaghetti Trees, except it
is a North Carolina farmer talking about how the wet
(34:57):
climate has created a problem where the marshmallows have melted
and fallen off the trees, and it is similarly given
with complete seriousness. It's great. In my class online update
for the day, on April fools Day twenty I posted
an update telling my students they needed to watch the
marshmallow farming video and that there would be an ungraded
quiz to review into JR operations using the numbers in
(35:20):
the video. When they actually clicked through to the quiz,
I let students in on the joke and I asked
them not to spoil the joke for their friends, and
I wish them a joyful April Fools Day. The feedback
I got was perfect. Some of them got the joke
right away and loved it. Others I had going for
a while, and yet others questioned my sanity until a
friend told them it was a joke. This year, on
(35:41):
April Fools Day, when I had all of my students
again for the next year of math, we fondly reminisced
and had another laugh. Uh. Shelsa writes. Also another brief
story related to your Alistair Crowley episode. I learned of
Alistair Crowley in my late teens when I became a
huge fan of David Bowie. Bowie referred to the Golden
Dawn and Crowley in his lyrics for quicksand I was
(36:01):
excited to hear Bowie's name mentioned in the podcast. I
am also including pictures of my black cat Natasha, my
tricolor Tabby Millie, I rescued from a cat horder on
the last day of school, in my meanest and favorite
hen pecking at my toes, my dog Ziggy sitting on
the picnic table in our backyard while I read, and
my dog Daisy basking in the sun. I hope you
(36:21):
both have a wonderful holiday season full of light and blessings. Cheers. Oh.
I love this email. One. I love it because it
gives the chance to thank educators too. That is a
great way to pull prank that is fun and joyful.
And three, that marshmallow video is funny. I haven't to
do it later. It's very very funny, and I love
(36:44):
love this collection of beautiful creatures, and I do understand
loving the meanest animals the most. I don't know what
it is, there's something in my heart I do the
same thing. So thank you, thank you, because this was
an absolutely oh and she says Andrea. Um, so yeah,
that's Andrea. I said it wrong every time. I only
just noticed the phonetics at the very end. I've done
(37:07):
this exact same thing with reading listener mail before. Yes. Uh.
The problem is that I read it from their email
address at the top, and then when I scrolled down
and see the thing, my brain goes, oh whoops. Yeah, well,
and my apologies. I've read the whole email, including that note,
(37:27):
but then I have recorded a whole podcast episode and
the note is not in my mind anymore. That is
precisely what has just taken place. So thank you Andrea
for writing us that, because it was absolutely a delight.
If you would like to write to us and give
me the chance to mess up the pronunciation of your name,
you can do that at History podcast at iHeart radio
(37:47):
dot com. Please forgive me if I do it. You
can also touch based on the podcast on social media
at mist in History, and if you have not subscribed.
You can do that on the I heart Radio app
or anywhere you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
(38:10):
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart
radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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