• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1617 0

disputed or discarded. As with the telegraph, and most matters of technological priority, the early history of daguerreotyping in America is beclouded by mythology, competing claimants, and unresolvable controversy. Other Americans obtained copies of Daguerre’s pamphlet too, or knew what it contained, and several newspapers published Daguerre’s (and Talbot’s) procedures, including the Observer. As Morse undertook his work, so did others in Boston, Philadelphia, or Cincinnati, experimenting with different chemicals, finding ways to speed up exposure times, making and selling photographs. The French invention became internationally popular, although in America more than anywhere else. By one estimate, over the next twenty years as many as thirty million photographs would be made in the United States. “In Daguerreotypes,” Horace Greeley said, “we beat the world.”

Morse brought a copy of Daguerre’s manual to a maker of scientific instruments, George Prosch, who built him a camera according to Daguerre’s diagrams, for $40. Daguerre’s process, which Morse followed closely, consisted of four steps: sensitizing a silver-coated plate with iodine vapor; inserting the plate in a camera and exposing it to light; treating the exposed plate with hot mercury vapors to bring up the latent image; and fixing the image by bathing the plate in sodium thiosulfate. There were problems: the fragile surface of the image could easily be marred or tarnished, the highly toxic chemicals could cause blindness.

At first Morse used playing-card-size plates of silvered copper bought at a hardware store. Thinly coated with impure silver, they proved defective, and he began ordering plates from France. He reported his progress to Daguerre. One time he mentioned that he had discovered superior material for the important preliminary polishing of the plates, which he proposed calling Daguerreolite. Another time he said he had attained only “indifferent success” in picture-making, for want he believed of a proper lens.

But once he got going Morse delighted in the “photographic paintings,” as he called them. According to one of his several accounts of the subject, he made his first successful daguerreotype in September 1839: a view of a Unitarian church taken from a staircase on the third story of the New York University building, with an exposure of about fifteen minutes. (The earliest surviving American daguerreotype, however, is of Central High School in Philadelphia, taken on October 16, 1839.) He made many other pictures as well: interiors with busts, books, rugs; views of Brooklyn, of rooftops in Manhattan, of City Hall; experiments to capture an impression of motion. Like most other early daguerreotypes, Morse’s no longer exist. With two exceptions, one including his daughter, Susan,* they have all become lost or destroyed.

Hoping to learn the fine points of Daguerre’s process, Morse took some lessons from a pupil and business associate of Daguerre’s named François Gouraud. Gouraud was introducing the new art to America, beginning with demonstrations, lectures, and private instruction in New York late in 1839. He also showed a collection of photographs, some made by Daguerre himself, steeply priced for sale at from $40 to $300. Attracting much attention in the press, he planned to tour the other major American cities, working his way south to Charleston and New Orleans, and from there to Havana.

During January and February 1840, Morse took lessons from Gouraud in making proofs. He observed, asked questions, and took down for future reference Gouraud’s teachings on the acidizing process, the mercury bath, the calculations involved in figuring exposure time. He put the instruction to use in making many experiments on his own. He recorded in some detail their often disappointing results:

Jan 25. Friday, very cold, clear, cloudless sky. arranged for interior. plate a little streaked with acid, which became in those parts purple in the iodine box; placed plate in camera at 12:10 … time in the camera 30 minutes. result very imperfect. the acid mark showed