After three years of adventure, William decided in 1840 to settle in Philadelphia and enter business. He had his brother, Frederic, come to America to be his partner. Frederic Langenheim brought to his brother news of the latest developments in photography and they decided to embark upon that pursuit. The year before, 1839, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre (1789–1851), in France, and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), in England, had announced successful still pictures made with a modified portable form of our old friend, the camera obscura, fitted with a chemically coated plate which after development made the picture permanent.
Frederic Langenheim was familiar with all these advances when he came to Philadelphia in 1840 and he either brought with him a good camera or one was ordered from Vienna shortly afterwards. In the winter of 1840–41 the Langenheim brothers opened a studio at the Merchant’s Exchange, 3rd and Walnut Streets, Philadelphia. They were not the first photographers in the United States but were among the pioneers.
Pictures from the size of a pea to very large ones were advertised. President Tyler and Henry Clay were among those who sat for Langenheim. In an early adventure in the use of photography for advertising, the Langenheims had something less than a complete success, from the client’s point of view. A picture was made showing a number of prominent persons drinking at a local establishment. It was not good for business—a rigorous public objected to the “drinking scene.”
Frederic, who was the “outside man” of the business and the principal photographer of natural subjects—William handled the business end and the portraits—went to Niagara Falls in 1845 and made scene pictures that brought fame and renown to the firm of Langenheim Bros. Copies were sent to Queen Victoria, the Kings of Prussia, Saxony and Wurtenberg and the Duke of Brunswick, the province in Germany whence the brothers originally came; and to Daguerre himself. The latter praised the successful photography in a letter transmitted to the Langenheims.
In 1848 William went abroad and in England concluded a deal with William Henry Fox Talbot, British pioneer in photography, giving the Langenheims exclusive contract rights to the Talbot calotype process which used a negative from which any number of paper prints could be made. It was a vast improvement over the Daguerreotype negative-positive system which did not make possible printing of copies but the Langenheims were not successful in sub-licensing the Talbot process in America.
Shortly after this the Langenheims made an important contribution to the art-science of light and shadow pictures by developing a system which made it possible to project the photographs in the old Kircher magic lantern. This prepared the way for the projection of a series of photographs showing a single movement.
Kircher and the others who used his magic lantern, including the projection model of Uchatius, painted or drew their various scenes on glass slides. Until about 1850 when the Langenheim development was announced, there was no satisfactory method of making glass plates of positive photographs. Of course, the heat of the projecting lamp made it impossible to use pictures printed on paper.
Frederic Langenheim, with U. S. patent No. 7,784, dated November 19, 1850, solved the problem. The Langenheim system was called “Hyalotype,” from the Greek, meaning “glass” and “to print” or to print on glass. Prior to the invention, some time in the winter of 1847–48, the period of the California Gold Rush, it was said the Langenheims, by means of a Viennese camera converted into a magic lantern equipped with a gas lamp, projected Daguerreotype pictures. This probably was achieved with the aid of a mirror system.
The early Langenheim glass projector slides were circular and of a deep sepia tint; later excellent black-and-white plates were made. The Langenheim glass photo slides reproduced nature on the screen “with fidelity truly astonishing.” The two plates of the slide were made adherent with Canada Balsam, which is still used in this way as well as to attach parts of projection lens systems. Only very recently have new synthetic resins begun to displace Canada Balsam for these purposes.
In 1851 the Langenheim Hyalotypes made their debut in Europe under great auspices, at the famous Exposition of the Works of All Nations at London. The glass projection photos were “very remarkable and well appreciated by competent visitors,” according to Robert Hunt, a pioneer British photographic authority, who inspected the exhibit and wrote about it.