THE
Alumni Journal
PUBLISHED BY THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
OF THE COLLEGE OF PHARMACY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
Vol. II.
New York, February, 1895.
No. 2.
“THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF PHOTOGRAPHY.”
By Prof. ARTHUR H. ELLIOTT, Ph.D., F.C.S.
The topic of my lecture this evening is one of my old hobbies, so that if I am a little prolix sometimes you must pardon me. It is something in which I have been more or less interested for the last twenty-five years, and, like most of our hobbies, we sometimes drive them to death, to the discomfort of other people.
The fundamental ideas upon which photography is based are very old—older than the Christian era, certainly. They depend upon two facts: First—that light, in passing through a small opening, produces an inverted image in a dark chamber. Imagine, for instance, that you are in a dark chamber, outside of which is an object; that there is in the chamber a small hole a sixteenth or an eighth of an inch in diameter, and that you have in this dark chamber a piece of paper. Upon that paper you will get a picture of the object opposite the hole. That was known a long time ago. The other fact is that certain salts of silver, notably the chloride, iodide and bromide of silver, are sensitive to light and become blackened by light, was known to the Egyptians. The action of light upon colored bodies must have been known to the very earliest observers among men. The bronzing of the human skin under the tropical sun must have been noted by every one; and it is on record, in the most ancient annals of the human race, that men—the fair men from the North—when they went to the tropics, returned with tanned skins. Ptolemy, over two thousand years ago, noted that beeswax was bleached in sunlight, and the old Greeks noted that the gems which we call opal and amethyst lost their colors when exposed to sunshine. These are some of the first and most rudimentary notions upon the actions of light, and we have no definite statements about making pictures without light. The Chinese have a tradition—and they have a great many curious ones that are often founded on facts—that the sun makes pictures upon the ice of lakes and rivers.
A Frenchman, named Fontamen, wrote an imaginary voyage to a strange country, and among other things he said that objects were reflected upon the water and when the water was frozen the images were retained. So this idea of certain surfaces being capable of receiving impressions by means of light was very ancient. There was another Frenchman, named Devique Delaroche, who made a still more curious statement. In 1760 he wrote a book in which his hero is wrecked upon a strange coast, and the spirits of that place showed him how to make pictures, as he called it, “painted by nature.” It is not quite sure what he means, but his words are something like these: “You know,” says his guide, “that rays of light are reflected from different bodies and form pictures. The spirits have sought to fix these pictures, and have a subtle matter by which these pictures are formed in the twinkling of an eye. They coat canvas with this peculiar matter, and hold it before the object.” The manner of holding it is not stated. “The canvas is then removed to a dark place and in an hour the impression is dry and you have a picture, the more precious in that no art can imitate its truthfulness.” These words were written one hundred and fifty years ago. This, as far as we know, was purely imagination; yet the idea—the germ of photography—was there. We shall presently see that this flight of fancy on the part of Delaroche was very near the truth, and foretold what has since become possible, and only a very short time after he said it.