Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

Entrancing as the story is, we can only here allude to a few of those discoveries and inventions that have become the handmaidens of the art which guided the chisel of Phidias and inspired the brush of Raphael.

Photography.—The art of producing permanent images of the “human face divine,” natural scenes, and other objects, by the agency of light, is due more to the discoveries of the chemist than to the inventions of the mechanic; and to the chemists of this century. At the same time a mechanical invention of old times became a necessary appliance in the reduction of the theories of the chemists to practice:—The Camera Obscura, that dark box in which a mirror is placed, provided also with a piece of ground glass or white cardboard paper, and having a projecting part at one end in which a lens is placed, whereby when the lens part is directed to an object an image of the same is thrown by the rays of light focused by the lens upon the mirror, and reflected by the mirror to the glass or paper board, was invented by Roger Bacon about 1297, or by Alberta in 1437, described by Leonardo da Vinci in 1500 as an imitation of the structure of the eye, again by Baptista Porta in 1589, and remodelled by Sir Isaac Newton in 1700. Until the 19th century it was used only in the taking of sketches and scenes on or from the card or glass on which the reflection was thrown.

Celebrated chemists such as Sheele of the 18th century, and Ritter, Wollaston, Sir Humphry Davy, Young, Gay-Lussac, Thenard, and others in the early part of the 19th century, began to turn their attention to the chemical and molecular changes which the sunlight and its separate rays effected in certain substances, and especially upon certain compounds of silver. In sensitising the receiving paper, glass, or metal with such a compound it must necessarily be protected from exposure to sunlight, and this fact, together with the desire to sensitise the image produced by the camera, not only suggested but seemed to render that instrument indispensable to photography. Nevertheless the experiments of chemists fell short of the high mark, and it was reserved for an artist to unite the efforts of the sun and the chemists in a successful instrument.

It was Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, born at Corneilles, France, in 1789, and who died in 1851, who was the first to reduce to practice the invention called after his name. He was a brilliant scene painter, and especially successful in painting panoramas. In 1822, assisted by Bouton, he had invented the diorama, by which coloured lights representing the various changes of the day and season were thrown upon the canvasses in his beautiful panoramas of Rome, London, Naples and other great cities. Several years previous to 1839 he and Joseph N. Niepce, learning of the efforts of chemists in that line, began independently, and then together, to develop the art of obtaining permanent copies of objects produced by the chemical action of the sun. Niepce died while they were thus engaged. Daguerre prosecuted his researches alone, and toward the close of 1838 his success was such that he made known his invention to Arago, and Arago announced it in an eloquent and enthusiastic address to the French Academy of Sciences in January 1839. It at once excited great attention, which was heightened by the pictures produced by the new process. The French Government, in consideration of the details of the invention and its improvements being made public and on request of Daguerre, granted him an annuity and one also to Niepce’s son.

At first only pictures of natural objects were taken; but in learning of Daguerre’s process Dr. John William Draper of New York, a native of England and adopted son of America, the brilliant author of The Intellectual Development of Europe, and other great works, in the same year, 1839, took portraits of persons by photography, and he was the first to do this. Draper was also the first in America to reveal the wonders of the spectroscope; and he was first to show that each colour of the spectrum had its own peculiar chemical effect. This was in 1847.

The sun was now fairly harnessed in the service of man in the new great art of Photography. Natural philosophers, chemists, inventors, mechanics, all now pressed forward, and still press forward to improve the art, to establish new growths from the old art, and extend its domains. Those domains have the generic term of Photo-Processes. Daguerreotypy, while the father of them all, is now hardly practised as Daguerre practised it, and has become a small subordinate sub-division of the great class. Yet more faithful likenesses are not yet produced than by this now old process. Among the children of the Photo-Process family are the Calotype, Ambrotype, Ferreotype, Collodion and Silver Printing, Carbon Printing, Heliotype, Heliogravure, Photoengraving (relief intaglio-Woodburytype), Photolithography; Alberttype; Photozincograph, Photogelatine-printing; Photomicrography (to depict microscopic objects), Kinetographs, and Photosculpture. A world of mechanical contrivances have been invented:—Octnometers, Baths, Burnishing tools, Cameras and Camera stands, Magazine and Roll holders; Dark rooms and Focussing devices, Heaters and Driers; Exposure Meters, etc. etc.

The Kinetograph, for taking a series of pictures of rapidly moving objects, and by which the living object, person or persons, are made to appear moving before us as they moved when the picture was taken, is a marvellous invention; and yet simple when the process is understood. Photography and printing have combined to revolutionise the art of illustration. Exact copies of an original, whether of a painting or a photograph, are now produced on paper with all the original shades and colours. The long-sought-for problem of photographing in colours has in a measure been solved. The “three colour processes” is the name given to the new offspring of the inventors which reproduces by the camera the natural colours of objects.

The scientists Maxwell Young and Helmholtz established the theory that the three colours, red, green, and blue, were the primary colours, and from a mixture of these, secondary colours are produced. Henry Collen in 1865 laid down the lines on which the practical reduction should take place; and within the last decade F. E. Ives of Philadelphia has invented the Photochromoscope for producing pictures in their natural colours. The process consists in blending in one picture the separate photographic views taken on separate negative plates, each sensitised to receive one of the primary colours, which are then exposed and blended simultaneously in a triple camera.

Plates and films and many other articles and processes have helped to establish the Art of Photography on its new basis.

Among the minor inventions relating to Art, mention may be made of that very useful article the lead pencil, which all have employed so much time in sharpening to the detriment of time and clean hands. Within a decade, pencils in which the lead or crayon is covered instead of with wood, with slitted, perforated or creased paper, spirally rolled thereon, and on which by unrolling a portion at a time a new point is exposed; or that other style in which a number of short, sharpened marking leads, or crayons, are arranged in series and adapted to be projected one after the other as fast as worn away.