The Camera, Part 1

and a necessary precursor to true photographic technology. Yeah. So, from like the writings of Master Mo in ancient China to the experiments of Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci, the camera obscura has been this fascinating way that people discovered to take an image of the ever changing three D world outside and project it onto a two D surface inside a box, either just through a pinhole or

focused with the lens or with a mirror. Yeah, essentially externalizing sight to a certain extent, like taking uh, something of what it is to see the world and uh and car having it away from reality, projecting it on the wall and uh and allowing us to see it there instead. Yeah. Well, it's it's making site a new

kind of thing. I mean, otherwise, site is seeing the three D world and putting an image of the world on a wall that does sort of suggest to you a new way that things could be like the idea, like a real image of the real world being just like a painting, something that you could, you know, move around and make copies of. And so the camera obscura did not constitute photography. It's sort of half of the story, right,

because photography has to do two things. Number one, it has to focus an image of the world on a two D surface. But number two, it has to make that image permanent, to fix the image so that it stays after the source of the light has gone away, right, like in a flint Stone's world. I suppose you could have a camera that consists of a camera obscura, and then there's a small of terra sa something inside the camera box that then traces everything, and then that would

be your photograph. But it's how we get that terrasaar tracing the upside down vision of a of a park h That is where we get into the like the true technology, the true invention of modern photography, exactly right. So we we've got the camera obscure, we've got the technology to focus an image on a two D surface using a pinhole or a lens. But the question is how to make it permanent, how to fix the image. The camera obscured does the first half, but how do

we get to the second? And I wanted to go ahead and mention a book that I'm going to be referring to, probably over the next several episodes that we do on the history of photography. This is a book I've been reading and really enjoying called Capturing the Light The Birth of Photography, A true Story of Genius and Rivalry, by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport. Now, this book focuses on the two main people who are actually credited as the inventors of photography in the modern sense, and that

would be Louis de Guerre and Henry Fox Talbot. We're not going to quite get to them today because today we wanted to focus on photographic technology that came before them,

what was almost photography but not quite. But actually the title of the book comes from a quote that Louis de Gare the the inventor of the de guara type, who will talk about more in the next episode, something he wrote in a letter to Charles Chevalier in eighteen thirty nine when he had made this discovery of how to really finally trap the image and what he said. This is translated from the French. He said, I have captured the light and arrested its flight. The sun itself

shall draw my pictures. Oh wow, that's beautiful. It is beautiful. It sounds almost kind of grandiose and diabolical. It makes the hair on the back of my next stand up

a bit. Hey. When we were talking about inventions and we have to talk about inventors, and you know, sometimes we can get a little carried away, you know, I wanted to read a quote from Watson and Rappaport's book where they're talking about the the intellectual uh background to the era of photography before photography came around, and the

writing about the influence of Isaac Newton. So they're discussing quote Isaac Newton's seminal work on the subject during the sixteen seventies, which culminated in the publication in seventeen o four of his Optics. In it, Newton unknowingly predicted the science of photochemistry when he remarked that quote, the changing of bodies into light and light into bodies is very conformable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutation.

And this is great in multiple ways, because he's talking about the idea that light could itself make a physical change in matter. Right, that that's what happens in a photograph. You're changing something in a fixed material object just by exposure to light. And that's like the key chemistry behind photography. But also when he talks about transmutation, the authors note that this is in a way a nod towards alchemy, and that Newton was this important bridge between the magicians

of old and the scientists of the new world. He was sort of the last of the medieval magicians and alchemists and the first of the modern scientists. Yeah. One thing I think we'll probably touch on again and again and all of this is that the photochemical nature of photography uh and and, combined with lenses and all, it does sound seem very magical. But in our age of of digital photography and uh and and cell phone pictures, it's easy to forget that that. Yeah, you had what

at heart was a chemical and an optical process. Yeah, and why does Why would it be that photography is anymore scientifically plausible than these fools errands of the alchemists,

like changing lead into gold. Right, you know that that seems from a from a vantage point where you don't know enough about chemistry to say, well, they're they're just sort of like equally fanciful chemical imaginings, right, And and some of the pre photographic processes that we're going to discuss here they do sound like some sort of an occult ritual. Oh yeah, I love this stuff. I can't wait to get to it. So, uh, picking up on what we talked about with the last time with the

camera obscure. Of course, the camera obscura was known very well to the scientific thinkers of like the Enlightenment era, and in the eighteenth century there was a steady increase in interest in whether the kinds of images projected in a camera obscura could somehow be fixed or made permanent.

This is something that came to mind for a lot of people, but they couldn't figure out how to do it right, because, as I mentioned earlier, you could have a flint stone situation where some sort of small dinosaur terrasaar then traces everything and creates an image. And we did discuss in the in the Camerascura episode how some individuals allegedly and in other cases certainly did use the camera obscura to trace images and ultimately create works of

more traditional art. Yeah, da Vinci, I think, but possibly Vermeer, right, Yeah, that's the theory anyway. But to have an actual chemical process that makes this possible without the need of of a mer or a cartoon dinosaur, that is the That's the key area of development that we're gonna be discussing today, to make a light capturing machine, something that automatically captures

an image of the natural world. Absolutely. Now, in all of our episodes of invention, we we do try to begin with a discussion of what came before, and we we have a whole episode on the camera Obscureau which gets into a lot of this. But I do want to drive home just a few additional highlights to emphasize just the importance of photography and why photography is ultimately one of the most important technological, artistic, and cultural advancements

of the nineteenth century. So for starters in the pre photographic world, unless you could afford a painter or craft such art yourself, you could only rely on fragile memories of friends and loved ones, uh in in order to remember what they like. Both how living individuals looked in the past when they were young, and how the departed looked when they were still alive. So, you know, think think about this. How fixed are your memories of your

loved ones appearances? Like, really think about it. Is it a you know? Is it a is it a definite solid thing? Or you perhaps remembering things just say a little to the left of reality, you know, or are you simply In many cases, I find myself doing this. Am I remembering photographs of people or rather than really remembering, uh, you know, an intense study of their facial features. I have a potentially sort of crazy idea about this, just

something to wonder about. I wonder if it's possible that actually lots of exposure to photographs of one's younger self could potentially psychologically delay the process of maturing. Like that you could potentially have a longer experience of feeling like I am a child, I am a young person because you are constantly seeing images of what you looked like when you were younger. Interesting, Yeah, I'm not sure about that,

but I think that's something to consider. I mean, this is the thing that's often been commented on that, you know, like in in wealthy societies, with modern technology, there seems to be a sort of like growing of the age of adolescence. People feel like they are young for more of their lives and like they become an adult later. Right, And you know, I wonder if something playing a role in this is just constant exposure to very reliable media reflecting what you were like and what you were doing

when you were young. Well, and as as the father of a six almost seven year old, I can tell you that they do love to look at photographs of themselves and of course hear stories about themselves. And and I look back on, you know, my own childhood. I remember being exposed to photo out physical photo albums a lot, and uh and you know, we had photos hanging on the walls and so forth. You know, you you grow up in a photographic world. Yeah. Well, anyway, I'm not

convinced to that. It's just some possibility to think about. Yeah, basically, I think it is important not to underestimate the power of photography on just the way we think about ourselves, our lives, and our loved ones. Absolutely not. I mean, it completely changed the world. You can't overstate it. Now. Another example would be the cataloging of fauna and flora of the natural world. Before photographs, one only had descriptions

and drawings to go on. Can you imagine that? Like, how if you wanted to be a naturalist, you know, Charles Starwin type or something. Before photography, it was a really important skill to be good at drawing, right, and or to have access to someone who's good at it. You know, I'm not good at drawing. I couldn't have done it. Yeah, and and so yeah, when you introduce writing or art into the scenario, you know, both are

highly subject to user error. Um and uh. You know, despite the fact that we do have plenty of impressive examples of of arts and descriptions from you know, from natural list, you know, throughout history, but still we also have some pretty bad examples to you know, where it's like a game of telephone to describe what a line looks like, it's etcetera. Yeah, we'll think about all those drawings from the Middle Ages, like drawing of a drawing

of a rhinoceros, you know, yours rhinoceros. Yeah, we get into this in an episode of Stuff to Plow your mind. But it looks like what would happen if the idea of our rhinoceros made it with a suit of armor. Yeah, I mean it's it's got a kind of like a tool album cover kind of d m T thing going on. Yeah, it's a it's a wonderful image, but it's not quite a rhino. Likewise, this would have placed you know, similar constraints on anything regarding geographic data, military intelligence, and even

you know, pre photographic journalistic enterprises. You know, any attempt to relay what was going on in another area, another part of the world, anything that you couldn't see with your eyes. Essentially, everything you understood about the world beyond your bubble of experience was limited by the power of written word and individuals artistic ability and the objectivity and accuracy of the writer or artist or storyteller. Uh, and

the visual processing power of your own mind. And then turn what they have given you into some uh you know, vision of reality. And I think and I think that's that's that's really really key. You know, it's easy to take for granted today that I can take something like Egypt. I've never been to Egypt, so I've never seen, you know, the wonders of the pyramid. I've never seen what life

consists of. You know, there's wonderful. One of my favorite things about traveling is just seeing what life seems to consist of for for everyday residents of a particular area. I have not seen any of those things in person, uh in Egypt, but I have seen photographs, and of course I've seen you know, the moving image as well. But but just the power of photographs make those things real in a way that descriptions and drawings um sometimes

struggle to recreate absolutely. But then take that, take that same principle and and shrink it down in scale and scope, So now you're not even talking about stuff all over the world, stuff you're removed from in vast amounts of time. Think about the way that it's necessary just to show you something that you weren't there for yesterday, the way it's now used to completely document life. Yeah, I mean, for example, think about cell phone cameras now, like that's

just how ubiquitous has become. Most of us have a camera on our bodies at all times that we can whip out and record anything. You don't remember what your license plate number is, well you just take a quick picture of it. And then if that same automobile gets in a fender bender, will you take a picture of it? Uh? If you were to see Bigfoot or Ufo, well you could conceivably take a picture of that as well. And that's arguably one of the reasons there are perhaps fewer

fewer reported sightings of these things in our modern world. Yeah, because now the question always be well, why didn't you take a picture of it? Yeah, you have camera right there. You have no excuse, right, I mean, I guess ghosts canna get away with it because you can say, well, the ghost didn't show up on camera. And yet uh, you you look to you know, the early days of photography, and you do see a lot of ghosts showing up

on camera. Because that's one of the other curious natures about technology, Right, You introduce a new technology and um it it it often makes room for new twists on supernatural ideas. Yeah, it's not long before the occultists come knocking. Yeah, we might have to come back to that on invention for say Halloween episode to discuss how how the invention of photography lead to how it influenced uh, supernatural and

spiritual ideas. Spirit photography totally the ectoplasm. Now, you know, even now, photography was again one of the greatest cultural and artistic shifts of the nineteenth century. However, as a Peter Glossy, Associate curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, UM pointed out in his book Before Photography, Painting and the Invention of Photography, photography was quote not a bastard left by science on the doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western

pictorial tradition. And I thought, I thought this was this was very um, this is very insightful, and I think something that's very important to keep in mind. Uh So, basically the idea is that photography, yeah, didn't just come out of nowhere. It wasn't just completely just dumped like this, uh dumped on the doorstep here. Uh No, it came on the heels of Renaissance strides in the invention of linear perspective and the championing of vision, as as as

the basis of artistic representation. Photography came on the heels of the many gradually formulated pictorial strategies. And you know of this pre photographic shift in artistic tradition. So I think that's important to to keep in mind. You don't just throw painting away because you have photography now. You keep painting, obviously, because painting is is beautiful and in

its many forms. But more to the point, you use the lessons of this long developed artistic tradition to inform how this new technology will be used not just to take pictures of the world, but to induce a kind of instant, hyper accurate, chemical painting of reality. Yeah. Absolutely, and I mean, of course, there are several ways to think about what you just said. I mean, one quite clearly is that photography emerges from a tradition of art

appreciation and art creation. I mean, some of the figures who were the most important in the early days of photography were in the arts. There were people who were accomplished as draftsmen, you know, people who were good at drawing pictures and recreating perspective and stuff. And the idea of photography was seen as an extension of that artistic project.

It wasn't just science and technology. I think from the very beginning it was art absolutely, But maybe now we should focus on the science and think a little bit about Okay, so we have this problem of people have the camera obscure. They've they've learned ways to take an image of the outside world and projected onto a two D surface. But how do you fix the image? How do you get something to stay once you've projected it? And and that's the thing we should explore next. What's

the chemistry behind the photography revolution? Alright, On that note, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to discuss Johann Heinrich Schultz. Alright, we're back. Tell me about Mr Schultz, Robert Alright, Joan

Johann Heinrich Schultz born seven died seventeen forty four. He was a German polly math, best remembered for his seventeen seventeen experiments with silver nitrate, which, by the way, had been discovered by Albertus Magnus Uh, you know, noted Um uh thinker and tinker and uh an alchemist in that they're teenth century. Magnus document documented, for instance, that nitric acid could separate gold and silver by dissolving silver. Yeah. So silver nitrate is chemically it's a g N O three,

it's silver. It's basically a silver salt. Yeah, and it's a precursor to various other silver compounds, but Schiltz was particularly interested in the way that various substances mixed with silver nitrate darkened in sunlight. Albertus Magnus himself had noted centuries earlier that silver nitrate could blacken the skin. That reminds me of the murder victims in the name of the Rose, who have had their fingertips blackened by an unknown substance. That becomes part of the mystery. Yes, not

only blackened fingers, but black and tongue. He did not write with his tongue. I presume I love the alchemy type origins here. One thing is that silver nitrate was also known uh was. Before it was widely known as silver nitrate or nitrate of silver, it was known to the alchemists as lunar caustic. This, of course because the

alchemists saw in action between silver and the moon. So a G N O three is a corrosive silver salt, and it actually has antimicrobial properties with some applications in the history of medicine, to say disinfect or to kill outer layers of cells on on some body surface. It's of course poisonous if ingested, So do not drink silver nitrate yeah, highly effective on werewolves eyes as well. Perhaps, Yeah,

but keep the lunar caustic out of your mouth. But again, Schultz was mainly interested in this darkening that occurred in exposure to the sunlight. Right, And in his day, the main hypothesis was that that heat caused the change. But in his experiments he found that silver nitrate dissolved into a slurry of chalk and nitric acid darkened when exposed to sunlight, but not when exposed to the heat of

a fire. So uh. In proving this out, he used stencils of words, and he put them around, you know, over the glass of a bottle of this mixture, and then he sat them the the bottle in the sun and this caused the surface of the contents to darken. We're exposed to the sun, and this, given the stencils, would cause the darkening to spell out the letters of the stencils. Right, So you could make shapes appear in

this solution by selective exposure to sunlight. Right. Instead of coloring in the stencil with a SHARPI or magic marker, he's allowing this chemical process to do it when exposed to sunlight. And then you could shake the bottle and the dark the darkened area would go away like sketch. Yeah, and you could do it again, or continued exposure would erase them as well. At any rate, these were ephemeral. He had no means of making the result permanent. Now

do these sun prints constitute photography? I think most people would say no, But apparently some historians, willing to take a really broad definition of photography, are willing to credit Truls with the invention of photography, at least have in

the past. Um, you know, I imagine that's also of he interests if you definitely want to make sure that um, say a German has attributed to you know, you see a lot of that at different times in history where there is kind of a you know, um, a nationalist interest or just a patriotic interest in attributing the inventor of a particular technology. The thing is, no matter how you shake it, no pun intended. Um, you know, Schultz is still a key individual in the invention of photography.

This is clearly not photography, but but yeah, it is. It is important what he discovered here about how you could you know, project images onto silver nitrate solution? Right, And you know, I believe we'll get into Thomas Wedgwood and a Humphrey Davy later. But but they worked with the creation of shadow images after Schultz's death. Uh, and

these two were impermanent. Okay, well, I think maybe we should move on then to talk about Thomas Wedgewood and Humphrey Dabut, But first I want to set the stage about where these kind of discoveries came from. So in the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was a very important, very influential supper club for intellectuals that that

met once a month in Birmingham, England. And these guys called themselves the Lunar Society or sometimes the Lunatics spelled with a k uh, And this was because they arranged their meetings according to the lunar calendar, hosting their dinners on nights of the full moon. So this is already conjuring some awesome druid connotations, like you expect them to bring out the bulls and start hacking at some mistletoe.

But these were not occultists. They were intellectuals, natural philosophers, liberals, and freethinkers, many of whom had a great interest in the emerging sciences and reportedly the real reason they arranged their meetings to coincide with the full moon is because that made it easier to walk home afterwards. In the absence of artificial lighting. One presumes them may have indulged in a bit of wine or other spirits during their

lunar bacchanalia. Ever thought about that, that that rationale for planning ones um drunken escapades in in in olden times. Wait a minute, I wonder if this could be part of the source of the idea that there's like, you know, people are lunatics on nights of the full moon, that there's this crazy behavior. Maybe it's because people plan that night to get drunk because they know it will be

easier to walk home. And yeah, I mean I've heard that the idea that's like, oh, on full moon, you know the prowlers, they have more shadows to hide in and that's why. But this this sounds like a more realistic way to look at it, like, oh, it's just this is the night when all the drunks are just going at it because they know they're going to have more light to stumble home by. Well, I don't want to overture I don't know that heavy drinking is the

reason for them. But they, at least these people they enjoyed, you know, having dinners and talking about discoveries and scientific experiments and debating things and so. Prominent members of the Lunatics Club included Erasmus Darwin, who was the patriarch of the Darwin family, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. He was a physician, a polly math, a freethinker, a slave trade abolitionist, and even a poet, a truly larger than life figure in many ways, like if you if you study, you know,

influential people in science and literature. At the time, it seems like all roads lead back to Erasmus Darwin. And Erasmus even actually worked out some prefigurations of the idea of evolution and common descent in biology, but he never put together a full coherent theory of evolution. That, of course would be up to his grandson Charles, who came up with the idea of natural selection, or at least,

you know, published the idea of natural selection. And one thing I love is that Erasmus Darwin published too many of his views about evolution and nature inverse, including in a poem called the Temple of Nature, which was published posthumously after Erasmus died in uh. It was published in

eighteen o four. I was perusing this poem because I've never really read it before, and I noticed that some lines of it preserve much of what we've explored already about, For example, Roger Bacon's idea that the study of light and optics was the flower of the whole of philosophy, and that without it, none of the other sciences would ever be understood. Kind of giving light a simultaneously theological

and scientific primacy in nature. Interesting. So, if you'll indulge me, I just wanted to read a few lines from the Temple of Nature. Erasmus Darwin writes, Immortal Love, who air the morn of time on wings outstretched or chaos hung Sublime warmed into life the bursting egg of night, and gave young nature to admiring light. You whose wide arms and soft embraces hurled around the vast frame, connect the whirling world, whether immersed in day, the sun, You're throne.

You gird the planets in your silver zone. I thought so, though apparently not everybody did. Apparently Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who are you know, wrote the color Ridge wrote the Rhyme and the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. He did not like dar poetry. He apparently wrote about an earlier work of Darwin's in the seventeen nineties quote, I absolutely nauseate Darwin's poem. I don't know, maybe I'm a sucker. I kind of liked it. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know,

it's no Kublican. But but what is right? Okay? But other figures among the lunatics, you had James Watt, important inventor of modifications to the principle of the steam engine. He didn't invent the steam engine, but he was a really important figure in its development. Oh yeah, And well, I'm hoping we'll come back and discuss him in the future as well. Absolutely. You also had Joseph Priestley, who

discovered and first described the properties of oxygen gas. Though he didn't call it oxygen gas, he called it deflogisticated air. Since he was working under the extremely incorrect flagistan theory, which tried to explain various forms of chemical oxidation like fire and rust by appealing to this hypothetical substance called flogistan, which does not exist, but oxygen does, and Priestley's contributions

to the sciences would prove very important. But also his like liberal politics like he supported the French Revolution, and his dissenting theological views made him a target of public scorn, which all culminated in the Birmingham Riots of seventeen ninety one, also known as the Priestly Riots, where people who were not a fan of Priestly or his ideas burned his house, destroyed his laboratory, attacked his friends, and committed general mayhem.

But another one of these figures of the lunarmn or the Lunatics was an industrialist and craftsman known as Josiah Wedgewood who lived from seventeen thirty to seventeen and so. Wedgewood was born the thirteen child of an impoverished family in the pottery business, and a childhood case of smallpox left him without the use of his right leg, which

later had to be amputated. And because he couldn't use his leg, even though he was in a pottery family, he was unable to work a potter's wheel, so in that of making pieces himself, he focused on designing pottery pieces and Josiah grew up to become an extremely successful

sort of empirical industrialist. He like he approached business with a scientific frame of mind, and he designed and manufactured pottery with a with a scientific approach to materials like clays and glazes, and a scientific approach to manufacturing techniques like Apparently his friend Joseph Priestley, who we were just talking about, would help him with improvements in the chemistry

of pottery. And one of the techniques that Wedgewood's pottery business employed was the use of the camera obscura, with which they would create tracings of landscapes and country scenes and then transfer them onto pottery pieces for decoration. And like many of his friends among the lunatics, Wedgewood was a political liberal and abolitionists. And on top of his technical inventiveness in the pottery making and glazing process, Wedgwood

was apparently super innovative in business marketing. Of course, I was reading a two thousand nine article in The New York Times by Judith Flanders, who wrote, quote most if not all, of the common techniques and twentieth century sales, direct mail, money back guarantees, traveling salesman, self service, free delivery by one get one free illustrated catalogs came from Josiah Wedgwood. So when you next time you go for

your Bogo deal, you think about this potter. But anyway, out of all this the you know, the Lunatic society, the Josiah Wedgewood pottery business. Out of all this context and family history came Josiah Wedgewood's fourth son, Thomas Wedgewood, known as Tom, the youngest in the family, who was born in seventeen seventy one, and according to descriptions at the time, Tom Wedgewood was he was allegedly a child very much in the spirit of the best aspects of

the Lunatics. He combined thoughtfulness, scientific thinking, uh, conscience, you know, industrious nous. If you read the accounts of him from people who knew him, it seems like people were gaga

for Tom Wedgewood, like Watson and Rappaport. Quote one friend of his who said Tom was quote a strange and wonderful being, full of goodness, benevolence, with a mind stored with ideas, a man of wonderful talents, attactive taste, acute beyond description, with even good nature and mild manners, and the English poet William Wordsworth, with whom, of course uh Thomas was friends, wrote of him like this quote, his calm and dignified manner, united with his tall person and

beautiful face, produced in me an impression of sublimity beyond what I had ever experienced from the impearance from the appearance of any other human being. Like, whoa, what what is it with this guy? Well, it sounds like he's he's tall and handsome, so that maybe helps a little bit. I guess words worth just crushing on him really hard. But at the same time, unfortunately, Tom faced a lot of health problems. He had had poor health since childhood.

Uh and it it's written that if he'd been in better health, he might actually have been more likely to really enter the family pottery business in earnest like there are indications that his father, Josiah intended him to be in the family business. He wrote that he intended him to be quote the traveler and negotiator for the firm, so he could have been all over the place negotiating big,

big pottery deals. Um. But instead it seems that some combination of his illnesses, his his poor health and his sort of lack of interest in pottery kept him out of the business, and instead he focused on private interests,

including art and science. He was apparently good at drawing, and he really loved chemistry, so he pursued experiments, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, with different chemicals, and he was encouraged in his scientific pursuits by figures like Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley, the latter of whom encouraged him specifically to study the mysterious properties of light and heat,

and so light especially grabbed Tom's imagination. He became really immersed in the study of light and optics and photochemistry. He had studied Isaac Newton. He knew a good bit about the properties of light, but at that point still no one had come up with a method for making the image projected in a camera obscura stay put after

the light source changed or disappeared. And so what Tom Wedgewood wanted to do was to take the principles of the camera obscura and combine them with chemistry to fix the image, in other words, to figure out how to create the first photograph, and eventually, around sometime around the turn of the eighteen hundreds. We don't know exactly what year this was. Wedgewood had discovered a method to produce what came to be called photograms or shadow grams or

silver pictures that kind of like shadow grams. Sounds good, sounds like something than elves would do at family reunions. Oh yeah, uh so, I want to quote a section describing this process from Watson and Rappaport's book. They write about the shadow grams. Quote. He achieved them by applying a mixture of silver nitrate dissolved in water to pieces of paper and then exposing the paper to the light with small flat objects such as leaves or insects wings

laid on their surface. He also tried using pieces of white chamois leather as the medium, which proved more successful. The leather readily soaked up the silver nitrate solution, and it is possible that the ingredients used in tannings, such as galls and salts, that were already present in it, reacted with the silver nitrate, giving a faster and more successful response. So he he's making an improvement on the

the Scholtz silver nitrate bottle. Right, He's getting a flat surface soaking it with silver nitrate, and this reacts to the light, creating the silhouette images. And it really did work, but it had severe limitations, the most important limitation among them being that the shadow grams were delicate creatures of the darkness. You couldn't expose them to any bright lights

or they would turn dark all over. So you could go to all this trouble of creating a fixed shadow gram inside a darkened box, but as soon as you take it out into the sunlight to look at what you've accomplished, it turns dark and becomes ruined. And so Wedgewood literally had to show his shadow grams to his friends and two people who you know, he wanted to understand what he was doing. He had to show them these things at night by faint candle light, or else

they would be annihilated. So we have a photochemical process here. We have a photographic process, but it is not resulting in something that we can really call a photograph. It is an e femeral product that the results. That's the key. It's a femorality. I mean. Other than that, you could say that these are the first real photographs, except that they didn't stay. You know, they were they were so

delicate and when exposed to light they would wither. And so a few years later Wedgewood collaborated with his friend Humphrey Davy, who you know, I always think that's a member of the monkeys, but I have to repress not he's actually a chemist. Humphrey Davy was a professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution at the time. This would have been, you know, around around the year eighteen hundred and together they reproduced Wedgewood's Shadow Graham experiments in the laboratory.

And Humphrey Davy himself had already been interested in this issue of of the powers of light and of recording light on a media, I mean invent He had written, quote, what we mean by nature is a series of visible images, but these are constituted by light. Hints the worshiper of nature is a worshiper of light. Again, this same kind of sentence, like the primacy of light in all of nature and all of the natural sciences, Like Roger Bacon, like Erasmus Darwin, and again together they were able to

fix an image, but they couldn't keep it fixed. They couldn't figure out how to protect the image from subsequent exposure to light, and unfortunately Tom Wedge had never published his findings because he was in bad shape by the early eighteen hundreds. At some point in the seventeen nineties, one of the dangers of being friends with Erasmus Darwin is that he will apparently prescribe you opium for your

health ills. And Erasmus Darwin had prescribed him opium. Unfortunately, this of course turned into an opium addiction that would go on to plague him for years. And uh, this seemed to be a common problem in these circles. Like Wedgewood was friends with the romantic poet we already mentioned, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had you know, said that one of Darwin's poems nauseated him. But also you know Coleridge

had severe opium issues. Oh yes, he wrote a Confessions of an English Opium Meter, which of course gets into some of this, and you know, describes these visions of crocodilians that would that eat experience. Yeah wait, what am I saying? It wasn't Cooler Ridge. It was Thomas de Quincy that wrote Confessions of an English Opium Meter. Sorry about that, No need to be sorry. It's all opium

under the bridge. And so, unfortunately Wedgewood died in eighteen oh five without publicizing his work on the shadow grams. But fortunately Humphrey Davy, his collaborator and friend, published them instead. And so in eighteen o two, a few years before Wedgwood died, Davy published quote an account of a method of copying paintings upon glass and of making profiles by the agency of light upon nitrate of silver, And this was in the Journal of the Royal Institution in eighteen

o two. Uh and Davy did give Tom Wedgewood credit for the discovery, so he didn't like steal that. He didn't steal his credit, but he did do the work. I guess that was a gentleman. But here we we come across just like a further subdivision of this problem. Like before we said that in order for something to really constitute photography, you had to be able to focus an image on a two D surface and somehow fix

the image there. And here Wedgwood and Davy had a sort of method for fixing the image, but the problem was they couldn't stop the image from from continuing to fix when they wanted it to. Subsequent exposure to light would just keep exposing the shadow gram until it contained

no information anymore. So the second half of the problem of photography I think now has to be divided into fixing the image really means exposing the original image and fixing it in place, but then preventing additional exposure to light from corrupting the first image. So so from here this really becomes the problem. And Davy unfortunately did not

pursue this research much further. Uh, he never discovered the solution to the problem, though he did predict that whenever someone was able to solve this problem to stop the image from continuing to expose and darken all over, it would quote render the process as useful as it is elegant. Now, in the next episode, we're going to explore the two figures who are most often credited with actually inventing true photography in the eighteen thirties, usually in eighteen thirty nine.

And these figures we mentioned their names earlier, of course, being Louis de Gare and Henry Fox Talbot. But before we get to them, I think we should mention at least one more important precursor to the photographic revolution, and that is the work of Joseph Nissa for Nips. All right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we'll start talking about nails. All right, we're back now. Before we started recording this episode, I think Robert and

I said the word nips about a hundred times. I know it's not his fault, but I cannot think about him without thinking about the Are they they called the the yip yips on Sesame Street. Yeah, I thought about them as well, the alien creatures. And then I also thought about the Knights who say nip the monty python, because you know that I guess would be the Knights who saying yeps. But yes, Joseph Nips lives seventeen sixty

five through eighteen thirty three. He was a French inventor, retired army officer and uh He's sometimes credited as the inventor of photography, but is it at the very least a key figure in the invention of photography because his discoveries were later improved on by Tagara and Talbot. But what Nips actually did here was he discovered a way to fix images on a pewter plate covered in bitumen

bitumen of Judea to be specific. Bitumen, of course, is a substance we've discussed and stuff to blow your mind in the past, in part because it's where we get the word mummy. We also mentioned it in the Invention episode on Roads because it is basically an asphalt of Asia minor, used in you know, in ancient times as a cement and a mortar, but also used for various other uses cosmetics, et cetera. Okay, so how does this process work? Okay, so the process was heliography, which I

think is a nice term. Yes, all right, it makes me think of earlier we mentioned how Degarat wrote, you know, the sun will make my drawings for me. Yeah, exactly. Um. But to understand how it works, you have to first understand how bitumen was used in making etchings on copper plates at the time. So you code a copper plate and taman and then you etch something on it by scratching away the bitumen and exposing the copper. So you

got this copper plate, it's coated in this asphalt stuff. Uh, and then you scratch away you say, you scratch a donkey into it or something. Okay, So it's kind of like like an engraving. Right, Well, that's exactly what it's going to be used for. Um, because after this you could bathe it an acid and that darkens the exposed areas. Everywhere you scratched away some of the bitumen, it is going to darken the copper. And then you dissolve the bitumin itself in solvent and you could then use the

plate to press the etching into parchment. Now, Nipps noticed that light made the bitumen less soluble, So lay an engraving printed sheet of paper over all of this, expose it to light, and then you could use a solvent to remove all but the light hardened portions of the bitumen. So in he used this very technique to make an exact copy of an etching of Pope Pious the seventh, but then it was later destroyed in one of his experiments. Yeah,

but but it was, you know, a copy. Uh. In he made a copy of an etching of a man on a horse, and this one, this etching. Uh this copy survives to this day the earliest example of a photographically created image. And he also did one of a woman at a spinning wheel. Uh. These are in effect the oldest photo copies in the world. It would be wrong to call him a true photograph. They are uh, you know, products of photographic technology, but they are essentially photocopies.

I'm looking at it right now. So we've got a young man i think, in a tricorn hat leading a horse by the bit. The horse looks very uh, kind of riled up and and muscly, and the guy looks very disturbed. Yeah, so he made a copy of an etching here. Again not photography yet, but getting close and closer. The thing is, if you combine this technique with the camera obscura, which which Nips also had experimented with earlier

on uh, then you have a true photograph. Uh. So the the image is cast upon the bitumen coated plate and in eight or eighteen twenty seven he used this method to take a photo of a view from a window in his house, and the results is the oldest known camera photograph in existence. It's I'll try to include this image on the landing page for this episode at invention pod dot com. Uh it is, it is rough, it's kind of hard to tell what you're looking at,

but it is a photograph created via this technique. It has an amazing ghostly quality, though it does it looks like something from the ring video. Yeah, it really does. But also just knowing what you're looking at, Uh, there's something kind of spooky about it, you know, like you're peering into like the the first of its kind of a way of looking at the world in history. Yeah. So from here in nine he would go into partner

with Louis de Guerre, who we mentioned already. Uh, and they were the partnership who continue until Nips died in eighteen thirty three at the age of sixty eight. And I guess in the next episode we're going to pick up with the stories of Louis de Guerre and Henry Fox Talbot, who are generally created credited as actually inventing

photography as we know it now. That's right, But even even then, so so far it's been just I think a fascinating journey just to you know, look at what the world was sort of like before photography and and explore these different technologies that all kind of come together because it's not and I guess this is the case really with with so many technologies that either we discussed in the show or we'll discuss in the future where it's you know, it's not just one area of innovation

and invention, but it's several different areas. So we have you know that the camera obscurea we have these these etching technologies, we have these uh you know, these these new discoveries about various chemical properties, all of them coming together, uh at just the right time, analyzed by just the right people, and then brought to new life in the

form of a brand new technology. One thing I want to continue to explore in the next episode, I think is the is the relationship between technology and art, and that's something that I think really comes through, especially in the life of Louis de Gerets. So I'm very excited to talk about that. That's right, So look for all that in the next episode of Invention. In the meantime, if you want to catch up on past episodes of Invention again, head on over to invention pod dot com.

That is the website for this show. You'll find all the episodes. You'll find a links out to a few different social media accounts. If you want to discuss this episode with other listeners, you should go on over to Facebook. There's a group there Stuff to Blow your Mind Discussion Module.

It is a place where folks who listen to invene in and stuff to blow your mind, hang out, discuss topics that we've talked about, discussed topics we should talk about, uh, and just share, you know, general generally interesting content with each other. A lot of squirrel memes to let's be honest. Yeah, yeah, it's all good. Okay huge Thanks as always to our

excellent audio producer, Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio because the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,