Dry Plate - Historical Considerations

Historical Considerations

The wet plate was, without question, a successful photographic process, but it had its drawbacks. Primarily there was the fact that a wet plate had to be used within ten minutes of preparing and secondly because of its slow photographic speed. The preparation of wet plates required numerous chemicals, beakers and liquids, all mixed in the dark in a portable tent if the photographer was planning on photographing away from the studio.

From the beginning of the wet plate process there were attempts to make plates durable; most notable are the attempts by Robert Bingham in 1850 and Richard H. Norris 1856. Both these processes lacked economical success, though Norris was slightly more successful, even establishing a factory.

The next notable attempt to make durable plates was by Joseph Sidebotham who used a collodion albumen mixture in 1861.

The lack of success for the above was not that it did not work, or that it was complicated, but because at the time, transportation — especially timely transportation — was complicated; by the time a plate from Birmingham in England reached New York in the USA it could be best used as window pane.

In addition, America had an import tariff in place to protect the national glass making industry. The American Excise Department did not recognize the photographic plates and taxed them strictly as sheets of glass. Locally these plates had a limited success, though