FATHER OF PHOTOGRAPHY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 5 November 1924, Page 7

FATHER OF PHOTOGRAPHY.

AND HOW HE USED THE SUN With- due piety the Royal Photographic Society has erected a tablet to the memory of Henry Fox Talbot, ‘the father of modern photography,’ ’’ says the Telegraph. “It as to be feared that the modern photographer, whose name is legion, spares but little attention for the history. °f his- processess, but those who have found the taking of photographs made so easy that tolerable pictures of almost any subject can he produced with. little trouble may profitably spend a moment on the difficulties which Fox Talbot found and his elaborate methods. For centuries it has been known that salts of silver blacken on exposure to light, and almost as long the earners ohscura has been a plaything. “After the beginning of last century a number of /people were independently attempting to bring these two discoveries into faithful association. In 1835 Fox Talbot made simple box cameras for taking views of bis house on sensitised paper. He was a Cambridge mathematician of some distinction, who became, interesting in optics, and hublished monographs thereon,' almost as soon as he left the University. He must have had a mind of singular energy and-versatility for. while he was engaged on his photographic investigations, he was also studying the antiquity of the Book of Genesis, and later he became one ,of the three original deciphers of the cuneiform inscriptions of Nineveh. “Just before the onee-famous process of Daguerre was published, in 1039. Talbot described his own success to the Royal Society. It is fair to say that the daguerreotype, whether to Daguerre or Niepce belongs the credit of its invention, was the first photograph which had any practical value. But in 1841 Fox Talbot patented his calotype process. He selected paper he brushed it over with a solution of silver nitrate, he dried at, the fire, he dipped it into a solution of potassium " iodide, be brushed ‘gallo-nitrat© of silver’ over it. /and then he exposed it in the camera. Sometimes it developed itself in .the dark, sometimes more ‘gallonitrate’ was necessary. Then the paper was made transparent by the application of wax, and Fox Talbot had what he. first of men, called negative; . “Let the modern photographer; with his rolls of film and his tanks and his prepared solutions, reflect, on the tasks which the' ‘father’ of modern photography’ set himself. It seem s a far cry from his laborious pictures of fern leaves and houses to the photographs of ; moving bullets and miles away in the Photographic vSociety’s new exhibition. But Fox Talbot’s calotypes are not yet a century old Who can guess what photography will he doing a century hence?’-’