Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [100]
Feb 7. Thermo 66. 20 min to 12. Interior. bright sun. Camera 15 minutes. result bad scarcely any impression.
Another. 5 min. to 1 … Thermo. 63. Arranged objects on the roof in the open air, just without the window. bright sun. 15 minutes. result very fair shadows too dark and light solarized. Another. 1 h. 28’ Thermo. 63. small plate. 10 min. no result. Another. 2h. 4. Ther. 63 a little wind agitates the drapery and prints, after 5 minutes a gust of wind deranged all the prints. no result.
Another. 3. 26. Ther. 63. Exterior, view towards Brooklyn. same plate, used no acid on any plate this day. 24 minutes in Camera. Result. Nothing!
Morse was joined in his work by the recently appointed Professor of Chemistry at New York University, John William Draper (1811–1882). Twenty-eight years old, a chubby, broad-faced man with a dimpled chin, he had published several sophisticated scientific papers on the chemical effects of light. Broadening his interest in photochemistry, he now devoted himself fervently to the daguerreotype. He and Morse experimented together, Draper concentrating on the scientific problems, Morse the artistic, “as more in accordance with my profession.”
Morse and Draper especially hoped to make photographs of people. According to Morse, Daguerre had discouraged the idea when he proposed it to him in Paris. Pictures of still objects required an exposure of fifteen to twenty minutes, and Daguerre believed it impossible for anyone to remain immobile that long. But Morse and Draper both succeeded in making portraits by Daguerre’s process. Who produced one first became a matter of friendly disagreement between them. Morse later said that around September or October 1839, he took ten-to twenty-minute portraits of Susan and some of her friends. This seems unlikely, since the Observer did not announce his feat until April 1840, remarking that “Europeans have not succeeded in taking Daguerreotype likenesses of persons.” This too seems unlikely, since according to François Gouraud, Parisians were making portraits only two weeks after Daguerre published his process. Morse later settled, or at least smoothed over, the issue by granting both himself and Draper something. Draper, he said, succeeded first “in taking photographic portraits with the eyes open, I having succeeded in taking portraits previously with the eyes shut.”
Whoever did what first, in the spring of 1840 Morse and Draper opened a primitive portrait studio atop the New York University building, consisting of a workshop and a shed with a glass roof. By using two mirrors—one to reflect sunlight on the other, which threw the light on the sitter—they achieved fast exposure times of from forty seconds to two minutes. On sunshiny days they made pictures of prominent New Yorkers and on darker days gave lessons to student daguerreotypists. Morse of course had always scorned portrait painting. Ironically, his chief pride was now his notable ability to produce portraits photo-chemically He even went to New Haven for the thirtieth reunion of his Yale class and took two group pictures of the others who attended, eighteen men arranged side by side in the yard of the President’s house. In doing so he apparently inaugurated a popular and profitable line of commercial portrait photography. “How valuable,” the Observer commented, “would such a momento [sic] of early friendship be to every class, on leaving college for the busy scenes of life.”
The surviving evidence about Morse’s alliance with Draper is too skimpy to judge their individual contributions to its success. Both by himself and with Morse, Draper did pioneering work in photography. Among other achievements, he took daguerreotypes by artificial light, applied photography to microscopy, and made the first known photograph of the moon, launching astronomical photography. On the other hand, Morse’s personal acquaintance with Daguerre and his standing as head of the N.A.D. made him more conspicuous than Draper and many other daguerreotypists. Aspiring photographers wrote to him from all over the country,