Miracles 200: Photography

We live in an age of miracles—a world where so many people's pockets hold a networked computer with a built-in videophone, cars can drive themselves, rocket boosters can land themselves, humanoid robots hold boxing matches, and we now casually accept not only voice commands, but deeper interaction with artificial intelligence. In truth, no matter what your age, we’ve always lived through an age of miracles, one that began long before the postwar America we (correctly) associate with a world-transforming technological surge. Pick your chosen starting point: Here’s mine.

This post is primarily about 1825 to 1840. Needless to say, we are looking back into a very different world, and the challenge is to accept that it was, indeed, a real world, once as real as the one you and I are sitting in right now. By any standard, it was an astonishing time when railways, photography, and telegraphy suddenly extended people’s power over nature to a degree that had been undreamt only a few years earlier. By the end of that century, each of these super-human inventions produced rivals and successors: telegraphy produced radio; photography produced cinema, and railways and bicycles produced automobiles. In the twentieth century, radio and cinema would produce television—but that’s another story. In the history of media tech, this is, in effect, The Early Show—as early as it gets.

Recently my wife bought me a used copy of an obscure book, A Concise History of Photography, by historian Helmut Gernsheim. Since then, I’ve been reading it and a couple of other tomes on the origins of photography, preparing this post about its 200^th anniversary. I read the now-accepted story of the nearly daylong exposure needed to capture an outdoor scene in 1826. What I didn’t know, and Gernsheim is too modest to point out, is that he is the reason we even know about this first-ever photographic image.

From the website smarthistory:

For more than a century, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was credited as the maker of the earliest surviving photograph. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s involvement received little recognition in our histories until View from a Window at Le Gras—with British botanist Francis Bauer’s inscription on the back—made its way into the hands of photography historian Helmut Gernsheim, who began to track its provenance in 1952. Gernsheim’s re-discovery of the image—affirmed by details from correspondence between Niépce and Bauer, led to the acknowledgment that Niépce played an essential role as a “founding father” of the medium—about 125 years after Niépce’s historic contribution to the invention of photography.

Only a tiny handful of experimental pictures survive from that mysterious period. In 1826, the original photosensitive materials were only barely sensitive and only yielded a faint image after hours of exposure, after which the ghostly image would fade. It was around 1835 that certain features of photography, which have remained familiar for nearly two centuries, came into existence: the need to shield the photographic materials from light, and a darkroom with chemicals to freeze a permanent image. Daguerre went public in 1839. He was the man who literally and figuratively fixed photography in the form that most people would know it for in its first generation of mass success.

The first human portraits date from June 1840, introducing the “killer app” of photography then and now; reaching out to family members potentially distant in space and (with implicit trust) in time, freezing happy memories that never age. Pictures from the 1840s are bold, strange, and carried away with the miracle of photography.

By the 1850s, the camera was still a miracle and a major symbol of the age, but the miracle was standardized, a little more familiar, comparable perhaps to the place that television would have in the next ‘fifties’ a century later.

Because of my America-centric education, I’ve overlooked the work of British photographers in the 1850s, some of which was remarkable. The war photos of the Crimea were revolutionary in their day. There’s a quote by a British Army officer, both admiring and condescending, about how every soldier one meets, however lowborn, can proudly present a daguerreotype of his family or his sweetheart. The silvery surface of the portraits-on-metal needed to be protected from scratches, but they were otherwise sturdy and small enough to carry, even into battle.

Colloidal plate photography—“wet plate” photography—was more practical than daguerreotype for a couple of reasons, mainly the ability to make copies. The Civil War photography of Matthew Brady was made possible by this improvement. Books and newspapers were able to print photos now. Then, dry plate photography made taking pictures much less fussy and difficult. Putting the dry plate onto a continuous strip of plastic was the final step in making photography easy and popular; that happened in the 1880s, less than half a century after Daguerre announced the existence of photography to the world.

There’s a strangely touching 1886 birthday picture of a 100-year-old scientist who had been present half a century earlier, photographed at that epochal event in 1839. In the year 2026, we’re looking at an actual picture of a man who walked the earth as we do now—but was born in 1786.

One sidenote I hadn’t thought about was a common what-if question that is raised, after the fact, about many inventions: Couldn’t photography have come along even earlier than it did? The key elements—the camera obscura, the artist’s and architect’s perspective drawing glass, and light-sensitive chemicals—were already known to exist by the end of the 18^th century. They just had to be put together.

The first photograph was made about six months after the first passenger railway. The telegraph, the last of this generation of miracle technologies, was developed at the end of the 1820s and beginning of the 1830s by New York University instructor Samuel F.B. Morse. Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet is a fine account of a telegraph operator’s working life. Western Union was the incumbent champion of electrical communications, a seemingly invincible monopoly until the age when it became an also-ran.

Another vivid link to the 19th century is Robert Bruce's charmingly titled 1973 biography of Alexander Graham Bell, Bell: The Conquest of Solitude. This is the kind of book that, sixty-plus years ago, would have been a standard library choice of mine. These stories of great inventors were my personal portal back to a vanished world where eleven-year-olds like me could tinker with telegraph keys, Erlenmeyer flasks, and dry-cell batteries with the reasonable hope of really inventing something.

Like the railways, the camera, and the telegraph, the telephone was one of the greatest successes of the 19^th century. We tend to forget that in the big picture—as SNL’s A. Whitney Brown used to say—this all took place a relatively short time ago: Less than three times my lifetime (I’m 74), little more than twice my father’s (he’s 95). In Napoleon’s day, communication and travel took place at speeds that were little changed since the Caesars. A generation later, that changed forever.