The role of Talbot in the history of photography. History of photography

Talbot (William Henry Fox Talbot) was a British scientist and photographic innovator, best known for his invention of paper that was impregnated with salt and the use of calotype processes. He had a wide range of interests in many subjects such as chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, classics and art history, although he eventually became known as a pioneer in the art of photography, which was still in its infancy in the mid-19th century. His invention of the photographic process of calotype was a significant improvement over the daguerreotype of French inventor Louis Daguerre. Talbot was the first to develop a photographic negative, thus making it possible to take multiple photographs. In the 1840s he worked extensively on photomechanical reproduction, which led to the development of the photoengraving process. Intelligent and curious at a young age, Henry developed his interests in a variety of subjects. After completing his studies at the prestigious Trinity College in Cambridge, the young man wrote several works that he presented to the Royal Society. Thus, Talbot began a series of experiments in photography. Over the next few years, he contributed several important aspects to the creation of photography, the most significant of which were the invention of salt paper and the negative. The Royal Society presented him with an award for his discoveries.

The great creator of photography was born on February 11, 1800 in Dorset, England. He was the only child of William Talbot and his wife Lady Elizabeth Fox. The father died when the boy was still a child. He lived in several families with his mother until she married in 1804. Henry was a bright boy with an innate curiosity and desire to learn. He received his primary education at Harrow School. He went to study at the prestigious Trinity College, Cambridge after completing his schooling. In 1821 he submitted documents to the Royal Society. Many of his works were devoted to mathematical subjects, although he also took a keen interest in the sciences and wrote articles on topics in physics and astronomy. This man had good artistic thinking, had a vivid imagination and therefore it is not surprising that he became interested in photography, a field that at that time was in the early stages of its development. Photography classes offered many opportunities for experimentation and discovery.

He began his optical research while still a very young man and published the article “Some Experiments on Colored Flames” in the Philosophical Journal in 1826. The article "Monochromatic Light" was published a year later. While visiting Lake Como in Italy in 1833, Talbot attempted to sketch the landscape but was unable to capture its full beauty. So he started thinking about a machine that could capture images on light-sensitive paper. The scientist began work on this project upon returning home. The photographer served briefly in Parliament (1833-34) and spent much of the 1830s experimenting with photography. He created salt paper by wetting the sheets with a solution of common table salt, onto which he applied a strong solution of silver nitrate. This made the paper sensitive to light. Continuing the development of the photographic process, the calotype method was used. It used paper coated with silver iodine, a process patented in 1841. His work The Pencil of Nature (1844-46) is considered an important and influential work in the history of photography. It was the first published book illustrated with photographs.

Henry Fox Talbot married Constance Mundy in 1832 and they had four children: Ela, Rosamond, Matilda and Charles. Photographer William Henry Fox Talbot suffered from ill health in his final years and died on 17 September 1877, aged 77.

Photography in the initial stage of its development is an image in a single copy; it could be repeated, but not a single copy could be obtained from it. The significance of what Talbot invented in the field of photography is so great and the dates of his discoveries are so close to the date of birth of photography that his name deserves to be placed on a par with the names and. William Henry Fox Talbot is the author of the invention of the negative and optical enlargement, which was most important for the entire further development of photography. Now, since the invention of the photographic negative, the photographic process began to break down into two main and consistent processes - negative and positive.

William Henry Fox Talbot was born on February 11, 1800 on the estate of his father William Davenport Talbot - in Lacock Abbey (Wiltshire in south-eastern England, between Southampton and Bristol).

The war that England was then waging with France (1793-1815) brought huge profits to English landlords, contributing to rising prices for agricultural products and rising rents. And when the Paris peace was concluded in 1815, England turned out to be the mistress of all seas and almost the only major colonial power: the importance in this area of ​​not only France, but also the Netherlands was destroyed. England managed to acquire new possessions in all parts of the world and thereby new markets for its goods.

The Talbots were among the landowners who became immensely rich in those years. It was not difficult for them to give Fox Talbot a brilliant education for those times at Trinity College, Cambridge University, where he studied mainly mathematical sciences.

After studying the course of science, in 1823 Fox Talbot went on a trip to Italy. It is quite obvious that the future inventor used the photographic process to sketch landscapes. Using a camera obscura to record beautiful landscapes and famous ancient monuments in their travel albums was a popular activity for “noble travelers.”

During his youth, Talbot took part in the political life of England. Among the list of “gentlemen without professions” who made up the overwhelming majority of the English Parliament elected in 1832 was the name of Fox Talbot from the county of Wiltshire. He remained a Member of Parliament until 1834. Subsequently, his interest in politics faded and he became known only as a "private scientist", a highly educated and unusually prolific inventor in the field of photography.

In 1833, Fox Talbot repeated his trip to Italy, upon returning from which, in 1834, he began his research in the field of photography. Talbot set himself the task of achieving the fixation of light images by chemical means and devoted almost all his future activities to the solution of this problem.

From the chemical literature of that time it was known about the photosensitivity of silver nitrate. Talbot prepared his first negative material from paper, applying layers of freshly deposited silver chloride onto it. Then Talbot improved this method: he soaked the paper in a strong solution of table salt, dried it and bathed it in a solution of silver nitrate. However, such negative material had low sensitivity to light, which was categorically unacceptable for outdoor filming using a pinhole camera. Experiments with long exposures also did not give the desired results.

Having learned about Talbot's difficulties, the famous physicist and chemist Humphrey Davy informs him that the photosensitivity of silver chloride is much higher than that of silver iodide. For a long time, Humphrey Devy, together with Thomas Wedgwood, carried out photographic experiments based on obtaining images of objects placed on a photosensitive material and illuminated with a sufficient amount of light. Later the result of these experiments will be announced.

Talbot began experiments, but noticed that silver iodide loses sensitivity due to an excess of potassium iodide salts. Thus, Talbot came up with the idea of ​​fixing silver chloride images not with table salt, as he had done before, but with potassium iodide. By the beginning of 1835, Talbot tested this idea in practice and became convinced of its correctness. Talbot initially made copies of prints, flowers, and lace, and by the summer of 1835 he was conducting experiments using both large and small cameras.

Paper negative. 1834 Calotype "Open Door". 1844

Over the next three to four years, Talbot was occupied with research into other physical and chemical problems and did not specifically work on further improving the photographic process. Talbot was a true polymath. His curiosity embraced the fields of mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, botany, philosophy, philology, Egyptology and art history.

Talbot was forced to return to research in the field of photography by a sensational message that penetrated the press in January 1839 that the French artist Daguerre had invented photography. Talbot was annoyed. Having interrupted his experiments in photography, he did not bring them to much greater results. Nevertheless, Talbot tried to challenge Daguerre’s primacy by submitting on January 30, 1839 to the Royal Society of London a written report on his method of obtaining light images on silver chloride paper (“Report on a type of drawing by means of light, or the process by which natural objects themselves give their images without the help of an artist's pencil"). In addition, physicist Michael Faraday showed photographs taken by Talbot.

Not limiting himself to publishing his method in England, Talbot hastened to inform French scientific circles about it, and on February 20, 1939, he wrote to Jean-Baptiste Biot, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, whom he had met several years earlier in England. In the letter, he reported that he had achieved silver chloride images; He fixes these images with potassium iodide or a strong solution of table salt or a new, especially effective drug, which was recommended to him by John Frederick William Herschel and which he must keep secret for now. On March 2, 1839, Talbot revealed the secret, saying that the best fixing agent for silver chloride images is sodium sulfate (hyposulfite).

Sir John Herschel, who called Talbot's invention photography and coined the words "negative" and "positive" to explain his process, considered the grainy print on paper child's play compared to the silver image. But he suggested a more effective way to remove unused silver chloride so that the image does not change in sunlight - to use sodium hyposulfite, which Sir John considered twenty years ago, in 1819, to be the best means for dissolving silver salts.

Herschel and Talbot carried out joint experiments on several occasions. “I remember we were visited by Mr. Fox Talbot, who came to show Herschel his lovely pictures of ferns and lace, obtained using a new process,” recalled John Herschel’s wife, “When it came to the difficulty of fixing the image, Herschel took one from him from the pictures and left. A few minutes later he returned: “I think it’s fixed,” he said, handing over the image to Mr. Fox Talbot. Thus began the use of hyposulfite in photography.” This technique was immediately adopted by Talbot, and somewhat later by Daguerre. Herschel's main areas of research were astronomy, physics and chemistry; he did not actually study photography. But in 1842, Herschel still contributed to the development of photography by developing the method.

On March 15 of the same 1839, Talbot reported the special sensitivity of silver bromide paper, which he placed in a camera obscura and on which he obtained images by direct blackening.

Despite the significance of these researches for the entire further development of photography, it was difficult for Talbot to compete with the achievements of Daguerre. The delicate tonality of the daguerreotype and the rendering of the smallest details visible with the help of a magnifying glass diverted everyone's attention from the looser images on paper that Henry Fox Talbot produced. His images were inferior in their perfection, in their light sensitivity. François Arago was not exaggerating when he told the Chamber of Deputies that Daguerre’s primacy in the invention of photography was recognized not only by French scientists.

After the publication of Daguerre's method, Talbot's work progressed more successfully. Having studied Daguerre's experiment, Talbot again turned to silver iodide and discovered that a barely noticeable and completely invisible (latent) image could be developed and enhanced by gallic acid.

Once, having subjected sheets of light-sensitive paper to a short exposure in the camera, Talbot put aside one of these sheets, on which he received a barely noticeable image. After some time, he discovered a clear and distinct negative image on this piece of paper and installed a substance that helps reveal such an image only after the slightest exposure in the camera. So he invented the production of paper negatives, calling his invention “calotype” (from the Greek words kalos - beautiful and typos - imprint).

His wife called the small cells "mousetraps." He placed several of these cameras around his home, Lacock Abbey, located in Chippenham, Wiltshire, and successfully obtained with each camera, after an exposure of only thirty minutes, an excellent “miniature photograph of the objects in front of which the cameras were installed.” He recorded these images, one square inch in size, by washing the paper in a strong solution of common salt or potassium iodide.

On February 8, 1841, Fox Talbot received an English patent for this invention. Now, on specially treated paper, after a relatively short exposure, Talbot developed the latent image by re-processing the paper's coating. Talbot fixed the resulting paper negative initially with potassium bromide, and later - from June 1843 - with hyposulfite. By heating on a heated iron sheet, he achieved a significant increase in the photosensitivity of calotype papers. Next, he began to make paper negatives transparent by impregnating them with wax.

Now Talbot had a negative at his disposal, with which he could make positive prints on silver chloride paper. Thus, Talbot practically carried out the reproduction of photographic prints.

Talbot, managed to put forward and correctly solve the problem of enlarging photographs. He pointed out that from a small calotype negative, using a special camera and lenses, it was possible to obtain an enlarged negative image, which would produce an enlarged copy on paper. Having carried out positive printing with enlargement, Talbot in the same year opened a printing house to produce printing plates for his book The Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), the world's first publication illustrated with photographs. In July 1843, Talbot filed an English patent for a method for producing an enlarged image.

Book "Pencil of Nature". Book "Pencil of Nature". Book "Pencil of Nature".

Talbot not only took patents for all his inventions, for every new improvement that he introduced into the photographic process, but also strictly ensured that the methods he patented were not used by anyone without his special permission - he prosecuted those who violated his inventive rights. Talbot seemed to be settling scores for the blow to his pride, for the annoyance that he had to endure in 1839, when he was so imprudently late in completing his research in the field of photography.

In 1851, Talbot pioneered very low-exposure photography, and the following year he patented a method of photographing by superimposing a “screen” on a photographic plate, which became the forerunner of the method of obtaining a raster halftone image.

Talbot's craving for patents and his extreme intolerance to all cases of their violation so noticeably slowed down the work of scientific researchers and inventors in the field of photography and turned them against Talbot that the president of the Royal Society of London considered it necessary to contact him in 1852 with a letter in which he indicated that in the interests of science and art Talbot should be more lenient in the use of his inventive rights.

Talbot responded by agreeing to disregard his patent rights and grant them as a gift to the public, excluding, however, those persons who intended to use his invention for commercial purposes. This decision of Talbot immediately led to a significant expansion in all countries of the circle of scientists and inventors working in the field of development and improvement of his methods, which became widely known as “talbotypes”, and led to new achievements and discoveries in the field of photography.

The inventor of the negative-positive process, William Henry Fox Talbot, had many talents. Equally passionate about science, Talbot was one of the scientists who deciphered the cuneiform text of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I (c. 1150 BC) in 1857. He published about 70 translations of other Assyrian cuneiform texts and 50 articles on various issues of natural sciences and mathematics.

Fox Talbot died on September 17, 1877 in the same Lacock Abbey, where he was born and lived his rather long life, which left a deep mark on the history of photography. In the last years of his life, he worked with unremitting energy on the development of color photography.

William Henry Fox Talbot (11 February 1800 - 17 September 1877) was an English physicist and chemist, one of the inventors of photography. He invented the negative-positive process, that is, a method for producing a negative image on a photosensitive material, from which an unlimited number of positive copies can be obtained.
William Henry Fox Talbot.1864.

Born on 11 February 1800 in Melbury Abbas (Dorset), he was the only child of William Davenport Talbot (1764-1800) and Elizabeth Theresa Talbot (1773-1846), second daughter of the Earl of Ilchester. When William Talbot was only 5 months old, his father died. Four years later, her mother married Charles Fielding (1780-1837). Talbot actively used family connections in scientific and political circles, which caused strong indignation among his opponents. He studied first with private teachers, then at Harrow. Graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge University. He studied mathematics, botany, crystallography, and deciphering cuneiform texts. He was elected a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Linnean Society, and the Royal Society of London.
Portrait of Talbot 1844

In 1823, during his first trip to Italy, Talbot used a camera obscura to sketch landscapes from life. He sincerely admired the beauty of a foreign country and, observing the daily life of foreigners, dreamed of capturing everything he saw. The inventor did not plan to engage in any particular genre; there was no such thing as genre photography at that time. However, in his famous calotype album “Pencil of Nature” (1844–1846) there is a photograph “Additional Ladder”, in which the everyday subject typical of a genre photograph is clearly visible.
“Additional Ladder” from the album “Pencil of Nature”, 1844–1846.

In 1835, he created the first negative; Talbot used paper impregnated with silver nitrate and a salt solution as an image carrier. He photographed the inside of his library window with a camera with an optical lens only 8 cm in size.
Portrait of a Footman, 1840, exposure 3 minutes

In 1840, he discovered a method for creating a positive copy on salt paper from a paper negative, with which you can create any number of subsequent copies. This technology combined high quality and the ability to copy images (positives were printed on similar paper). Talbot called this technology "calotype", and it was informally dubbed "talbotype".
Portrait of Ela, Talbot's daughter. early 1840s

The inventor of the Daguerreotype, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, presented almost the same discovery to the scientific council in 1939, but unlike the Talbot process, the daguerreotype was created on glass and not on paper. Despite the fact that by 1839 Talbot had long known about this method of obtaining prints, his discovery was not recognized as the first. However, history has dotted all the i's, and photography for the last 100 years has been carried out using the technique discovered by William Henry Fox Talbot. In addition, the negative-positive process allows you to make copies from a negative, but this cannot happen in daguerreotype (there is no negative).
Carpenters at work. 1842

In 1841, Talbot registered a patent for a negative-positive method of creating photographs. For photography, he uses iodine-silver paper and develops it with silver nitrate. Fixes with sodium thiosulfate. He puts the resulting negative into a container with wax, which makes the picture transparent. He then places the clear negative on clear silver iodine paper, exposes it, and produces a positive copy after developing and fixing it.
Lecoq Abbey. 1842

In 1844, Talbot published the first book with photographic illustrations: The Pencil of Nature; in doing so, he uses hand-drawn calotypes.
Cover of the book The Pencil of Nature

He also discovered the Talbot effect - self-reproduction of the image of a periodic lattice. In an article published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1836, he describes experiments in which he discovered periodic changes in color in the image of a diffraction grating when he moved away from it the focusing lens used for observation. His work contains neither quantitative measurements nor an attempt to explain what is observed.
Suspension bridge in Rouen, France.1843

Talbot died in Laycock Abbey (Wiltshire) on September 17, 1877.
Lady Elizabeth Teresa Fielding. 1843

Sleeping Nicholas Henneman. 1843

Portrait of Horatia Maria Fielding and Thomas Gasford.1843

Portrait of a young man. 1843

Open door, 1843

London street 1845

Portrait of Neville Storey-Maskelyne.1845

Market Square, 1845

Fruit merchants.1845

City street.1845

Fox Talbot with his assistants at work, 1845

Talbot's photographic studio. 1845

Street in Frankfurt, cloudy day, 32 minutes in the cell 1846

Russell Street 1848

Holy Trinity Church, Oxford Road, 1848

Talbot with camera obscura

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) is responsible for one of the most significant discoveries in the history of photography - the invention of the negative-positive process.

The only son of William Davenport Talbot and Lady Elizabeth Fox Strangways, William Henry Fox, was born in the town of Melbourne, Wiltshire. The heir of an aristocratic family, he received an excellent education, graduating with honors from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics, physics, literature and classical languages. In 1822 he was accepted as a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1832 - of the Royal Society. Member of Parliament, biologist, Assyriologist, he was certainly one of the most prominent figures of his time.

Important invention

Carried away by politics, Talbot quickly loses interest in it and, soon after graduating from college, leaves for a trip to Europe. The beauty of Italian landscapes amazed the young scientist. But, being endowed with a subtle artistic taste, Talbot practically did not know how to draw. At first he uses a camera lucida for his sketches. But he soon abandons it, since working with it still requires drawing skills and hand precision.

Then Talbot turns to the simplest type of camera - the camera obscura. The result of his photographic experiments was the invention of photosensitive paper. He discovered that if a piece of paper was immersed in a weak salt solution, and after it was dry, dipped in a solution of silver nitrate, silver chloride, an element sensitive to light, was formed on the paper. After exposure and processing, Talbot received a negative image.

First photographs on paper

As he continued to experiment with the camera obscura, he discovered that smaller cameras produced better results because they required much less exposure time. Having built several of these “mousetraps,” as his wife called them, he placed them around his home, Lacock Abbey. It was then that he took one of the world's first photographs (August 1835), the exposure of which lasted 30 minutes.

In 1844, he described the process of his search and its result in the book “The Pencil of Nature,” which became the first commercial publication illustrated with photographs.

In January 1839, French physicist François Arago's report of the daguerreotype method at the Paris Academy of Sciences prompted Fox Talbot to be the first to publish information about his process. Just two weeks later he spoke at the Royal Society, demonstrating work from four years ago, including photographs of Lacock Abbey. Some time later, he announced the technical details of the “photographic drawing” method, ahead of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, who spoke only in August of that year.

Improvement of technology

Talbot continued his photographic experiments. In 1840, he discovered (Daguerre two years earlier) that treating exposed negatives with gallic acid could reduce development time to a few minutes, whereas previously it took hours. After development, Talbot used a warm hyposulfite solution to fix the image, then rinsed the negative in clean water, dried it and rubbed it with wax, making it transparent. Using contact printing, he made positive images from these negatives on silver chloride paper. He called the images obtained in this way “calotypes” (from the Greek Καλός - “beautiful”). Later they were called “tolbotypes” in honor of their inventor. One of the main advantages of this method was that the resulting negative made it possible to obtain an unlimited number of positives. In 1842 Talbot was awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society for his discoveries in photography.

In 1841, Talbot patented his invention for 14 years. The feud between the scientist and the photographers, who demanded a reduction in the cost of the license, lasted exactly the same amount of time.

In 1852, The Times published an open letter from the President of the Royal Society, Lord Rosse, and the President of the Royal Academy, Charles Lock Eastlake, in which they called on Talbot to abandon the patent, pointing out that his stubbornness was holding back progress. photos.

In response, Talbot agreed to abolish the fee for amateur photographers, but professional portrait photographers still had to pay considerable money to the inventor (100 pounds for the first year of use and 150 for each subsequent year). Perhaps the reason that forced Talbot to take such a step lay in the fact that over the years of photographic experiments he himself had spent a fortune. But, be that as it may, the public was indignant, and the number of legal cases that Talbot opened against illegal users of his invention grew. This was one of the reasons why in 1855, after the patent expired, Talbot decided not to renew it, thereby making his method publicly available.

The prototype of modern photography

Calotype was never able to equal the popularity of Daguerre's invention (partly due to the fault of Talbot himself). But unlike daguerreotype, which disappeared after the 1860s, it survived much longer and became the basis of modern photographic processes. In addition, Talbot was the first among the inventors of photography to solve another very important problem - enlarging photographs. He discovered that enlarged positive copies could be obtained from a small negative, and he put his idea into practice.

William Henry Fox Talbot lived all his life on the family estate of Lacock Abbey, where he died in 1877 at the age of 77. Despite the fact that at first Talbot’s invention was not considered the best and most promising in the world, it was on its basis that photographic equipment developed in the future. And who knows, perhaps if it weren’t for Talbot, the history of such camera and equipment manufacturers as Epson, Samsung, Canon and others would have gone completely the wrong way.

Cover of the fifth issue of the album “Pencil of Nature”

December 1845

Lithography

National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, UK

National Science & Media Museum. Science & Society Picture Library - All rights reserved

Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin presents the first exhibition in Russia of one of the inventors of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877). The exhibition presents rare photographs that have become textbooks for the history of visual culture - about 150 author’s prints and negatives from the collection of the National Museum of Science and Media in Bradford and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (UK), as well as a camera obscura and a camera lucida, with with which it was possible to create images, from the collection of the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow. The display of early examples of British light painting continues the museum's series of projects that introduce viewers to famous masterpieces of the art of photography.

An English aristocrat and scientist, Talbot had diverse interests in the fields of physics, chemistry, mathematics, archeology, and politics; He gave presentations at meetings of the Royal Society of London for the Advancement of Natural Knowledge. Talbot's name went down in the history of photography. It was he who invented the original method of obtaining photographic images using a negative-positive process. The scientist began experiments on creating prints on paper in 1834 at the family estate - Lacock Abbey. Already in 1835, he made a discovery, discovering the possibility of obtaining a positive image from a paper negative using salt and silver on photosensitive paper. In this way he was able to replicate the photographs. Talbot managed to develop a simple and inexpensive photographic process, which was called talbotype or calotype (ancient Greek “kalos” - “beautiful” and “typos” - “imprint”) and was patented in 1841.

Talbot's scientific discovery was not only a breakthrough in photographic technology, but also determined the development of photography as an art. In 1844, Talbot published the album “Pencil of Nature” with original prints, to which he wrote comments about the possibilities of the new medium. He described his discovery and outlined the potential of photography as an art.

The album “Pencil of Nature” was published from June 1844 to April 1846. It consisted of 23 prints and 1 negative created by William Henry Fox Talbot. The objects of photography were city landscapes, still lifes, genre scenes, copies of documents and engravings. The album was published in parts, each of which contained from three to five prints. The prints themselves were created in Talbot and Henneman's photographic studio, The Reading Establishment, in Reading. More than 6,000 calotypes were printed for the first issues. Due to imperfect technology, prints from the “Pencil of Nature” quickly faded, so the publication was not a commercial success. And, although Talbot planned to publish 50 photographs in issues 10-12, only 6 parts were released, containing 24 photographs.

Translation from English of texts from “The Pencil of Nature” - Marina Davydova and Tatyana Natakhina.