Daguerre wrote a seventy-nine-page booklet, Histoire et description du
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| Daguerre: The artist's studio. Daguerreotype, signed and dated 1837. Societe Francaise de Photographie. Paris |
procede nomme le Daguerreotype. His instructions were so complete that anyone could have the apparatus built by an instrument maker and could anticipate some sort of success if he followed the directions carefully. Within live months twenty-nine different editions and translations of the manual had appeared; to list their places of publication is to plot the spread of the daguerreotype through the Western world: Barcelona, Berlin, Garlsruhe, Edinburgh, Genoa, Halle, Hamburg, London. Madrid, Naples. New York, Paris. Philadelphia, Quedlinburg. Saint Gall. Saint Petersburg. Stockholm. Stuttgart.
But Parisians complained that the brochure was written in too scientific a language; the process seemed excessively complicated. In answer to this criticism the government ordered Daguerre to make daguerreotypes publicly, so that the very simplicity of the process might become clear.
A special correspondent of the New York Star went to the demonstration of September 17 at the Grand Hotel on the Quai d’Orsay. He reported that Daguerre
took a plate of copper plated with silver and rubbed the silver surface in a slight manner with very fine pumice powder and sweet oil, using small balls of cotton wool for this purpose. He thus completely dulled the surface, and I noticed that he rubbed first with a circular motion, and then with straight lines from top to bottom.
He then washed the plate thus dulled in a liquid consisting of: distilled water, 16 parts; nitric acid, 1 part. He then gave a slight heat to the plate by passing it over the flame of a lamp — the copper side being next to the flame and the silver surface uppermost. He then washed it a second time in dilute nitric acid.
The plate was now ready for a coating of iodine. The apartment was darkened, and the plate, fixed on a small board, was placed (with the silver part downwards) over an opening the size of the intended picture, in the lid of a box at the bottom of which the iodine was. Halfway down in the box was a slight wooden frame on which a piece of muslin was strained, and through this muslin, as the iodine evaporated, the fumes rose, and were thus equally received upon the silvered surface, there forming a coating of iodide of silver, having the yellow appearance of brass.
A camera obscura was now brought up. Its focus had previously been adjusted by trying the effect of the picture on a bit of ground glass. The plate prepared as above was placed in the camera. The view intended to be taken was the Tuileries, the Quay and the Seine in front of the window where the camera obscura was placed. It was there to remain until the action of the sun’s rays on its surface was sufficient. This occupies a period of from five to forty minutes, according to the time of the year and state of the weather, and as the director (for I cannot call him the operator) cannot see by the plate how the process goes on, experience alone can tell him how to judge as to the advancement which the action of the light has made. In this instance the day was dull, and the plate remained fifteen minutes in the camera obscura. When it was taken out it appeared exactly the same as when it was put in, and the people looked very blank, I do assure you, at what looked like a failure; but indeed one could scarcely tell whether or not it had been marked, for the process requires that no light fall on it before finishing operations.
M. Daguerre took the plate and held it with the silver part downwards, and thus held it for half a minute, while three persons peered upon it and said, “Nothing has been traced upon it.”
He fixed it then, at an angle of 450, in a box at the bottom of which was an earthen pan holding two pounds of mercury. Under the pan was a lamp which heated the mercury to 62° Centigrade or 1170 Fahrenheit, and as the mercury grew hot its globules arising, combined with the prepared surface of the metal, brought out the picture. In front of the box is a glass spyhole, through which the process is watched, and the moment it was completed the plate was taken out and washed with distilled
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| dacuerre: A Parisian boulevard. Daguerreotype sent by Daguerre in 1839 to the King of Bavaria. Bayerische Nationalmuseum, Munich |
water saturated with common salt or with the hyposulphite of soda, heated a degree below the boiling point. This finished it. and the picture, thus literally executed by the sun, was handed about.
I never saw anything more perfect. When examined by the naked eye every object appeared minutely engraved, but when viewed through a magnifying glass the difference of grain in the separate flags of the trottoir was visible, and the texture of everything, if I may use the phrase, was easily distinguishable.
The Star's reporter was amazed that there was no trace of an image on the plate until it had been "brought out” by the mercury vapor. This development of the hidden or latent image enabled Daguerre to reduce the exposure time, and to succeed where earlier experimenters had failed. It is a principle followed ever since in most photographic processes. But still the exposures were minutes long. During those minutes vehicles and pedestrians moved about; they did not stay still in one place long enough for the plate to record their images. In only one of Daguerre's pictures does a man appear: by chance a pedestrian on the boulevard had stopped to have his shoes shined, and had held still during most of the exposure.
The daguerreotype had another disadvantage. Each picture was unique. It could be duplicated only by making a copy of it with a camera or by hand. Many engravings and lithographs after daguerreotypes were published; between 1840 and 1844 a hundred and fourteen travel views were issued in Paris as the series Excursions Daguerriennes. Daguerreotypes taken in Europe, Africa and America for the publisher, N. P. Lerebours, were painstakingly-traced and transferred to copper plates by the aquatint process. Figures and traffic, imaginatively drawn in the Romantic style, were added in an attempt to please the public who abhorred the depopulated aspect of the first daguerreotypes.
Although albums of engravings after daguerreotypes were popular, the public was disappointed that the daguerreotype did not reach the heights anticipated by the first announcement. “It has excited some surprise,” we read in the London Athenaeum for October, 1839, “that, after the eager and natural
Daguerreotype camera and equipment, about 1843. Plate holders, box for holding plates, coating box, camera with double Chevalier lens dated 1843, mercury bath with thermometer and alcohol lamp. Collection Albert Gilles, Paris
Daguerreotype, 1844. of N. P. M. Lerebours, Friedrich von Martens, inventor of the first panoramic daguerreotype camera, and Marc-Antoine Gaudin. From Bossert & Gutmann, Aus der Fruhzeit der Photo-graphie, 1930
curiosity of the public concerning the discovery of M. Daguerre while it yet remained a secret, so little interest should now be taken in the subject.” One reason was that, in spite of the apparently generous action of the French Government in offering the daguerreotype free to “all the world,” the inventor applied for and received a patent in England. Another, and more important reason, was that the process needed radical improvements if it was to fulfill the public’s demand for portraits.