Assignment 4

• Thomas Wedgewood and Sir Humphrey Davy make some of the first images to be recorded using light and publish findings in the journal of the royal institution.
• In 1826 Joseph Nicephore Niepce creates hellographic images/technique.
• Louis Jacques Mande’ Daguerre team up with Joseph Nicephore Niepce to develop both the hellographic technique and the Daguerreotype technique.
• In 1839 the French government award Daguerre and Isidore Niepce (Joseph’s son who partnered with Daguerre after Joseph died in 1833) a pension for the technology of the Daguerreotype and offered the discovery to the world
• 1834 William Henry Fox Talbot began experiments with silver chloride
• In 1839 both Dagurre and Talbot race to get their experiments published.
• Hippolyte Bayard invented a direct positive process on paper in 1839
• Mungo Ponton, a Scotsmen observed that paper soaked in a saturated solution of potassium bichromate was sensitive to light. This lead to Talbot discovering the hardening effects of gelatin treated with chromium compounds.
• In 1840 several independent discoveries discovered that different combinations of chlorine, bromine and iodine fumes could produce daguerreotype plates much more sensitive. The design of a faster lens, formulated by Max Petzval. Both improved the Daguerreotype so that shorter exposure times. Another improvement made was by introducing Hippolyte Fizeau, this process known as gilding, this extended the range of tones and made the fragile iamge highlight less susceptible.
• Improvement in lenses and a charged formula to use silver iodide, which was more sensitive
• By the late 1840’s the Daguerreotype was being used commercially in every industrialised nation of the world.
• American Daguerreotypists in particular produced superior portraits by using a technique perfected in America called galvanizing.
• In 1847 a new negative process produced the niepceotype was published in France by Abel Niepce de Saint Victor. The Niepceotype process was never to be used for studio portraiture but for landscape and architectural subjects.
• In 1848 Frederick Scott Archer, an English sculptor and amateur calotypist, experimented with collodion as a binder for silver halides as a means to improve the calotype.
• In 1864 the carbon process patented by Sir Joseph Wilson Swan was universally adopted.
• The last quarter of the 19th century introduced gelatin emulsion plates, papers and flexible films. This became technology that was accepted until digital technology.