Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [158]
They did not, but Hill made an improvement no less questionable. Some daguerreotypists had been hand-coloring their pictures. A few, notably in France, experimented with producing colored plates directly. Hill claimed that he had invented a method of photographing colors accurately, brilliantly, and permanently. Secretive, he vowed to let no one see specimens of his work until he had perfected the method and could, as he said, “dress the child of light for the public gaze.” Gossip about his hillotypes, as the pictures became known, gave rise to speculation about them in the photographic journals and the general press. Many daguerreotypists regarded him as an ignorant pretender.
Hill wrote to Morse about his invention, virtually begging him to visit his home in Westkill, New York, a hamlet about sixty miles from Poughkeepsie. Morse seldom left Locust Grove, and invited Hill there instead. But Hill declined, explaining he was too ill to make the trip, suffering what he oddly called “nondescript derangements of the billiary and nervous systems.” Morse finally did venture to Westkill, though it meant a seven-hour drive in a gig through a wild region of the Catskill Mountains. Hill had been physically threatened, so he said. He protected himself at home with a guard dog, revolver, and warning system. And he showed Morse no samples of his yet-imperfect invention: “Extreme Caution has been my motto … applying it to honest men as well as rouges [sic].”
Despite the bunker atmosphere, Hill impressed Morse as no crank but rather a retiring, sensitive “man of genius.” Either he had genuinely discovered a method of photographing colors or was under an “honest delusion” that he had. More than that, Morse saw him as a pious prayerful man, exclaiming in his own way What Hath God Wrought: “I am rejoiced to know that you specially recognize the hand of our heavenly Father in making you the honored instrument of its introduction to the world.” He gave Hill some stock certificates to help finance his further experiments.
Grateful for Morse’s trusting friendship, Hill wrote to him often as he tried to perfect his process. He made twenty-five to fifty pictures a day, “verily and truly,” he said, “heliotyping the actual natural colors.” His letters sound paranoid, full of suspicions about a photography establishment out to “crush” him and a world conniving to deprive him of title to his invention (“the French Savans … are preparing to pounce upon my prize”). Far from discounting Hill’s fears Morse identified with them. He assured Hill that piracy and calumny were to be expected: the new process after all would make Daguerre’s obsolete and put daguerreotypists out of business. Burned by his own rub with O’Reilly, he advised Hill not to take out a patent but to maintain his secrecy. “He shall not be plagued with lawsuits, have his life shortened and made miserable, and his just right in the property of his discovery snatched from him, if I can prevent it.”
Around September 1852, a year after Morse’s first visit, Hill again asked to see him. He said he feared he would not live much longer, having sustained a violent hemorrhage, seemingly from his lungs. Morse again made the trek to Westkill. This time Hill showed him some twenty specimens of his work. Most seemed dubious. But two were “exquisitely beautiful” color portraits, another a color full length of a child, a fourth a color landscape. Moreover, the French specimens Morse had heard about were evanescent and soon perished; the colors of Hill’s images were fixed and no exposure to light