I looked in yesterday at the Roy Society of Arts, in the Adelphi, where, in connection with the centenary of photography, a small but e; tremely interesting exhibition of apparatus used by the fathers of photography is on show. There is a large wooden camera used by Daguerre, big enough to take plates 12 x 10 in. (though most daguerreotypes are about quarter plate size) and a box in which his metal plates were developed as they had to be, by the heat of a methylated spirit lamp. There are three cameras used by Fox Talbot, the real ancestor of modern photography in that he first produced negatives from which unlimited positives could be printed.
One of them, though made of wood, might rank in size with the miniatures of today. An enormous ma-hogan roll-holder is shown to carry the rolls of sensitized paper used for negative making as lately as in 1855. And a page from an old "Mllustrated London News" gives a picture of the large horse-van fitted up as a dark room, which Fenton took through the Crimean War, and produced hundreds of pictures in it, very excellent. ones too.
The first photographic catalogue of 1855, is also shown. Chiefly one is truck by the cheapness of the apparatus. The best doublet lenses cost only £6. And a collapsible walnut wood box camera to take pictures 7 x 6 in, cost only £4 guineas. It is amusing to see in the catalogue the iron head-rests into which a subject's head was screwed to keep him still while the photograph was taken. Many of us are old enough to remember the use of similar tortures in our youth, and the fixed, glazed look which one inevitably acquired during the long exposure.
The photographic centenary has been worth observing if only in bringing to memory the many-sided genius of Fox Talbot. He was a Whig MP. and helped to pass the Reform Bill of 1832. The year before that he had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for his conspicuous work as a mathematician and chemist.
And he made a profound study o! the origins of words and published a book on them. So one may recall that architecture was a side-line for Sir Christopher Wren, who was primarily a mathematician and scien-fist; and Leonardo da Vinci was personally much more interested, and in his life-time distinguished by, his work as engineer, scientist and mathematician than his pictures. Nature does give with both hands sometimes,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.