PhotoHistory

From: Complete Self-Instructing Library of Practical Photography Volume I - Elementary Photography By AMERICAN SCHOOL OF ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY, J. B. SCHRIEVER, Editor-in-Chief 1909

The Meaning of Photography Its History.

Photography is the art of producing images of objects by the agency of light. Such images may be made on many different materials by direct contact of the object to be imaged with a sensitive surface; or the image may be projected on the sensitive surface, by the aid of a lens. The underlying principle is the same in both cases, though the manipulations are different. The first mentioned method is that characteristically used in photographic printing processes; the second in the making of photographic negatives.

The effect of light on certain substances is to induce chemical changes in them which alter their properties. Many hundred such substances have been noted, and others are being added to the list continually. Those which are useful in photography may be roughly grouped under the general heads of first, gums and resins; second, the salts of various metals, chiefly those of the silver-platinum group.

A familiar example of the chemical action of light is the fading of colored paper in parts exposed to sunlight, while protected parts are unchanged from the original hue. Instead of fading, or becoming lighter, the reverse effect may take place, the exposed parts becoming darker. These results are due to some chemical employed in making or in tinting the paper. The “Indelible Ink” used in marking white cloth is colorless when fresh, and turns black by exposure to light. This is chiefly due to the fact that the “ink” really consists of a solution of silver nitrate, a salt very readily darkened by light.

If a freshly made solution of gum arabic in water is made and enough to form a thin film is poured into a flat-bottomed saucer, it may be allowed to dry in the dark. Place a coin in the center of the dried film, and set the dish where it will receive the overhead rays of the sun for an hour at mid-day. If then the coin be removed, and the film be held under a gentle flow of lukewarm water, the circular patch of gum that was underneath the coin, and thus protected from the light, will readily dissolve and be washed away. The remainder which received the full rays of the sun no longer dissolves readily, but requires warmer water or a longer washing to remove it. In this case the action of light has altered the property of solubility, although this alteration was not outwardly apparent, but “developed” only when the lukewarm water was applied.

If lampblack had been mixed with the gum arabic solution, and the washing arrested when the soluble part was gone, the image would be white (the color of the saucer), with a black border formed by the remaining gum with the lampblack mixed. If chalk had been used instead of lampblack and a black saucer instead of a white one, under the same conditions a black image surrounded by white would result. These experimental results are of importance as giving the key to many modern methods of photographic printing and other processes.

If a piece of sensitized Ferro-Prussiate paper (”blue-print” paper) is exposed to daylight for a short time, and then developed by immersion in water, the sensitized side will turn blue all over. If another piece is similarly exposed under a drawing made with black ink on tracing-cloth (which is almost transparent), the inked side next the sensitized paper surface, and immersed in water, only those parts of the surface that were not under the black lines turn blue; the parts that were protected by the black ink are unchanged and wash away, leaving the image of the lines showing white on a blue ground. In this experiment the tracing cloth, with inked lines, was used as a “negative” for producing the print or “positive.”

“Negatives” made by photography involve exactly similar principles. As a matter of convenience, photographic negatives are usually made from an image of the object which is greatly reduced in size, by the intervention of a lens in a miniature “camera obscura.” Some light-sensitive material is spread upon a support, preferably transparent, for greater facility in subsequent “printing” operations, and the light is allowed to act under suitable conditions. The results of this action are “developed” to a certain point, the development arrested and the unacted on material removed or rendered inactive; this latter operation constituting the “fixing” of the negative. From the negative thus produced, positive images or prints may then be reproduced in any required quantity, by the same or other processes.

Negative making or printing involves the principles of photography; whatever special applications may be made of these principles.

HISTORICAL.

The story of photography is that of a dream come true a fancy transmitted into fact.

Whoever was the first to wonder why the image of the summer clouds in a woodland pool, or his own face reflected in his shield of burnished copper, might not be fixed there such a one was, in spirit, the first photographer. Around some such fancy, legends grew; of magic mirrors that would show scenes at a distance; of charmed basins that held, in the water that filled them, gruesome pictures.

Then came the practical people still under the inspiration of the dream, working it out toward realization, in separate ways, until another, assembling the scattered materials combined them into a step, leading up to the door which at last was reached and opened on the wide and ever widening field.

Combining as it does the practical application of optics the science of the nature, properties and transmission of light and chemistry, which treats of the changes in material bodies arising from alterations in their composition, it must be the case that the early events in the chain leading up to final achievement have occurred at irregular intervals, and often without their influence or possible bearing being realized or even suspected. Many books like this would fail to cover all the details of the complete story; only the briefest summary of the salient points of interest connected with the origins of photographic negative and positive processes will be admissible here.

The first definite stage that we note in the unfolding and completion of present-day photography was the invention attributed to the Neapolitan philosopher, Giambattista della Porta, of the “Camera Obscura,” This he described in his book on “Natural Magic,” published in 1569. He admitted a ray of light through a small aperture in the side of an otherwise darkened room, and found that the image of objects on the outside was thrown on the side of the room opposite the aperture, but reversed top for bottom and left for right. He also found that a double-convex lens, placed in the aperture, would make the shapes and colors more distinct. This apparatus is the basis of all modern photographic cameras. Instead of the photographer being within the camera, as Porta was, he views the image through a sheet of ground-glass forming one side of it unless he chooses to dispense with the actual inspection of the image, as he is compelled to by the construction of the majority of hand cameras. With these, a miniature camera, a focusing scale or similar device is employed to secure the focusing and arrangement of the view.

Fabricius, in 1556, found that silver chloride, which occurs as an ore, called “Horn Silver,” in certain silver mines, turned dark by exposure to light. He prepared the silver chloride artificially, and noted that this compound, white when freshly prepared, likewise turned black by exposure. But he was interested in other matters and made no use of this discovery.

Not until 1727 was any application made of this property of darkening in the light which belongs to silver salts in general. In that year Schulze, a German chemist, mixed powdered chalk with silver-nitrate, filled a clear glass bottle with the mixture, and placed on the outside of the bottle a paper label, lettered in black ink. When, after exposure to light, the label was removed, it was found that the parts underneath the ink had been unacted on by light, remaining white, while the translucent paper had allowed the light to pass, and blacken the other parts. Thus the letters appeared in white, on a dark ground; until they too, after the removal of the label, turned dark, like the background. This experiment is the basis of most printing processes involving the use of a negative.

Thomas Wedgewood and Humphry Davy, in England, worked along the same lines three-quarters of a century later, the results of their experiments having been published in 1802. They coated white paper or white leather with silver nitrate, and printed thereon, using various opaque objects, also paintings on glass, as negatives. They also experimented with the camera obscura and with the solar microscope an adaptation of Porta’s idea. They were foiled, however, by the low sensitiveness of the silver salt and the impossibility of “preventing the unshaded parts of the delineations from being colored by exposure to the day.” In other words they were unable to make their prints permanent to “fix” them.

In experimenting with the then new art of Lithography, Joseph Nicephore Niepce about 1813, tried the substitution of metal plates for lithographic stone and the use of a kind of asphalt as a coating. With the idea of saving labor in drawing, he put the asphaltum-coated plate in the camera-obscura and made a long exposure to a sunlit object. The high-lights acted on the asphaltum, making it insoluble; the shadows had no effect, and permitted the coating to be removed by a solvent. The metal plate, treated with acid, was etched away around the parts that had been protected by the insoluble portions of the coating, and a relief-plate was produced, which could be printed from. Niepce’s process, besides giving the suggestion of development of a “latent image,” is exactly the same in principle as that now employed in making “half-tone” engraving plates, such as are used in printing the studies and similar illustrations of this book.

A prominent scene-painter in Paris, L. J. M. Daguerre, heard of Niepce’s experiments, made his acquaintance, and in 1829 formed a partnership with him for working out the idea into practical form. No particular progress had been made when Niepce died, in 1833, and Daguerre continued experimenting along his own lines, finally achieving success in 1838. He announced the full details of this, the first successful photographic process, publicly, on August 19, 1839, and was pensioned by the French government for so doing. Daguerre used a polished plate of silver copper, on which a film or iodide of silver was allowed to form, by exposing the silver surface to the vapor of iodine. This coated plate was then exposed in the camera, and developed by the action of metallic mercury vapor. Fixing was accomplished in a solution of common salt.

The pictures produced by this process, called, in honor of the inventor, “Daguerreotype,” have never been surpassed in delicacy and beauty. They are not really positives, but negatives of exceeding thinness, “backed” by the mirror-like surface of the silver. This is the reason why the earliest daguerreotype pictures are reversed. Thus, in a portrait, if the right hand rested on a table, the daguerreotype would show it as the left. This drawback was overcome by interposing a mirror or a reflecting prism. But the greatest inconvenience, and one impossible to overcome, was this, that only one plate could be made for each operation; every duplicate required a separate operation.

While Daguerre was experimenting in France, another investigator was at work in England, along quite different lines those of Schulze and Wedgewood and Davy. William Henry Fox-Talbot announced his process in January, 1839, subsequent to the announcements of Daguerre’s discovery, though previous to his public divulging of its details.

Talbot in his original process used paper coated with silver nitrate and chloride in combination, making prints of opaque objects, as Wedgewood and Davy had done, but fixing them with a solution of common salt. He also discovered that this paper, exposed in the camera for a much shorter time than was needed to produce a visible image, received an impression, a latent image, which could be developed by a solution of nut-galls; and that this image, which was reversed, not only in regard to position, but also to lights and darks, could be used as a negative, from which to produce, by contact, positives, to any required extent. To this process he gave the name “Calotype,” and is entitled to the credit of originating, in principle, the method now universal.

To John Herschell is due the use of the compound usually termed “Hypo” really Sodium Thiosulphate as a fixing agent. This was adopted in practice and its introduction marks an important epoch. Although glass plates had been used incidentally by Wedgewood and others in photographic experiments, the suggestion of their use, instead of paper, in producing negatives, seems to have been Herschell’s also. The very important “Blueprint” or Ferroprussiate process, so extensively utilized in modern industrial and engineering work is another of his contributions to photographic progress.

The discovery of gun-cotton, in 1846, by Schonbein, was destined to have an important effect on photographic methods, a few years later. Ordinary cotton fiber, treated with “Aqua Regia,” a combination of nitric and hydrochloric acids, is so altered in composition as to become soluble. It is interesting to note, in passing, that gun-cotton enters also into the composition of celluloid, the basis of “films.”

Niepce de St. Victor, a nephew of the original Niepce, using glass plates for the negative support, made them practicable by employing starch and albumen as a medium which adhered closely to the glass surface, while carrying an iodide in combination. This coating was sensitized by application of silver nitrate; development with gallic acid and fixing with potassium bromide completed the process.

Blanquart-Everard, in 1848, applied the albumen coating to paper for printing. The albumen acts as a “size” and results in keeping the chemicals and consequently the image, on the surface of the paper, instead of sinking into its substance. The usefulness of “Albumenized paper” for print making secured the wide adoption of this process, the earliest of the “glossy” as distinguished from the “matt” class of printing papers. In 1850 Gustav Le Gray, although not the originator of collodion, used it to replace albumen as a coating and medium. Collodion, the solution of gun-cotton in mixed ethyl-ether and alcohol, leaves a fine transparent coating of film on a glass plate on which it has been poured, the ether-alcohol solvent quickly evaporating.

These experimental suggestions and partial successes were combined, in 1851, by Frederick Scott Archer, into practical working shape, as the “Wet Collodion” process. So effective and satisfactory was it that it was everywhere adopted, supplanting Calotype, Daguerreotype and all other “types” for practical purposes and keeping the field almost entirely to itself until about 1880. Its drawback was the condition that the plates must be sensitized by immersion in a nitrate of silver bath and used almost immediately. Whenever exposures were to be made at any distance from studio or work-room, this imposed the necessity of transporting a cumbrous outfit for sensitizing and development in a portable dark-room of some sort. The results, under proper conditions, have, however, never been surpassed by any other process in the prompt and sure production of negatives having perfect transparency in the darks and opacity in the high-lights, together with satisfactory gradation in the intervening “half-tones.” The “contrasty” properties of such negatives render them still the mainstay of the photo-engraver today.

In 1855 Taupenot suggested the “dry-plate bath” process. He employed “preservatives” gallic acid, honey and albumen to prevent the crystallization of the silver nitrate which occurs when a sensitized wet-collodion plate is allowed to dry. This crystallization renders the action of exposure and development uneven, spoiling the result. Other experimenters, at about the same time, employed tannin, sugar, beer, gum, resin, tea, coffee and tobacco and many other substances, as preservatives; but none of the methods became widely popular, although special workers produced notably successful results in numerous instances.

In 1864, Sayce and Bolton published the details of a collodion-emulsion. The principle of this process was the use of the sensitizing agent, the nitrate or other salt of silver, in practically the precise quantity required for the chemical combination that occurred, through the action of light, on exposure. Up to this time it had been the practice to have the silver nitrate in excess. The collodion emulsion could be prepared in bulk and used at convenience for coating glass plates, which were dried and could then be used as required. Many workers contributed to the perfecting of the details of this process, but all their results were superseded by the next advance, the Gelatin-Bromide process.

In 1871, Dr. Maddox suggested and worked out the idea of substituting a solution of gelatin in water for the solution of collodion in spirits, combining it with bromide of silver. This suggestion was eagerly taken up by the experimenters and within the next decade the commercial production of gelatin dry-plates on a large scale had become a reality, and the actual popularization of photography, rendering it available to all, had begun.

From 1880 to the present time, modifications and improvements, optical, mechanical and chemical, have followed in such bewildering profusion that it is impossible to summarize them, even briefly. They have resulted, on the negative-making side, in wonderfully increased sensitiveness, reducing the necessary time for exposures so that thousandths of a second have become among the common-place. Where time is not the chief object, then other results, such as color sensitiveness, are attained. Most recent are the wondrous results obtained by the Lumiere color process, attained along new lines of application, and promising far greater advances for the future.

Mechanically, the invention of an American, Dr. Goodwin, which substituted for fragile, heavy, rigid glass a support of celluloid, a substance at once flexible, light and tough and practically of equal transparency, has really revolutionized photography on its practical side and rendered it popular to an extent difficult to realize.

The practical introduction of this improvement and the countless accessory apparatus, cameras and the like, is to be credited to another American, George Eastman, who has made “Kodak” a household word throughout the world. Indeed, to many thousands of people it involves and comprehends the entire meaning of “Photography.” The nature of the material permits of its manufacture in rolls of any desired length, available for one, a half-dozen, or a thousand exposures. By the ingenious application of well known principles, these rolls in the shape of “cartridges” may be put into and removed from suitable cameras in full daylight, without injury to the result.

A still more striking instance of the adaptability of such rolls is their use, in quantities measurable only by thousands of miles, for making the negatives and positives employed in one of the latest applications of photography, the Cinematographs or “moving pictures.” This use bids fair to overshadow, by comparison, the quantities, already so large, of material required in other photographic fields. And now that cinematographic pictures, closely approximating “natural colors,” have been announced as an accomplished fact, the mind can scarcely comprehend what further increase this will involve.

It cannot be amiss to call the attention of those who may read the foregoing brief survey of the origins and progress of photography to the importance of an acquaintance with its historical side. Not a week passes that does not see some new use or application made of methods that are, by comparison, old; and to those who are ambitious of advancing, as students and practitioners, nothing can be more useful than an acquaintance with what has been done by their predecessors in the field, to whose devoted labors the present day owes its debt for the knowledge it has received from them.