Photography
Reade was present at the Royal Society to hear William Fox Talbot's first presentations on photography in February 1839 and immediately started to experiment himself. Reade was also at the Royal Society on 14 March to hear Sir John Herschel’s seminal paper on photography in which Herschel proposed sodium hyposulfite as a fixer. Herschel also made some observations on the light sensitivity of silver carbonate, nitrate and acetate as being superior to silver chloride.
Reade began experimenting with light-sensitive substances and soon discovered that he could get much better results when the silver salt was applied not to paper but to tanned leather. Allegedly, he used his wife's mittens for experiments. Reade conjectured that the difference in sensitivity was caused by gallic acid used for tanning, and indeed by treating paper with gallic acid before soaking it in silver nitrate solution, he could drastically increase the sensitivity.
In 1854, Reade testified at the Talbot v. Laroche trial, where Laroche tried to prove that Talbot's calotype patent was invalid because the use of gallic acid was first discovered by Reade, from whom Talbot learned it. In his testimony, however, Reade upheld Talbot's originality, explaining that while he had used gallic acid for preprocessing the light-sensitive paper, Talbot was the first to discover that gallic acid can reveal the latent image in an already exposed paper, i.e. he was the first to develop a photographic material. In fact, Reade erred in making the latter broad statement, as the earlier Daguerreotype process also involved the chemical development of an initially invisible latent image.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Bancroft Reade
Famous quotes containing the word photography:
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.”
—Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942)