Then, in , Lady Elisabeth married Captain later Rear-Admiral Charles Feilding — and the boy effectively gained a real father. Although referred to as Fox Talbot by some of his contemporaries and many later writers, Talbot strongly disliked this use of the family name, almost always signing Henry F.
Talbot or H. He was a brilliant student and eager to learn, but was painfully shy and reclusive by nature. Her propensity for travel abroad diversified his education and contacts, and the intense interest in botanical studies and gardening throughout her family inspired his lifelong involvement in botany.
Following his initial tutoring at home and in Sussex, he was accepted at Harrow School in He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in , becoming a scholar in In he won the Porson university prize in Greek verse. He proceeded MA in Almost simultaneously, he was elected to parliament as the reform candidate for Chippenham.
By the time he met John Herschel in Munich in , Talbot had already published six papers in mathematics. In Talbot was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Talbot had his most famous intellectual breakthrough in October , on the Italian shores of Lake Como, when he found himself in the frustrating position of being unable to sketch the scenery. This led him to:. Thus was the concept of photography born.
Talbot possessed no facilities for experimenting while travelling and was immediately plunged back into parliamentary duties on his return to England. At Lacock Abbey, some time later in spring , he began to turn his dream into reality.
By coating ordinary writing paper with alternate washes of table salt and silver nitrate, he embedded a light-sensitive silver chloride in the fibres of the paper. Placed in the sun under an opaque object such as a leaf, the paper would darken where not defended from light, producing a photographic silhouette. He continued his researches in Geneva during the autumn. Unable at this stage to use his paper in the camera, he asked an unidentified artist friend to scratch a landscape design into opaque varnish coated on glass.
Another method of fixing, probably noticed by Talbot even before Geneva, was based on his observation that the edges of his paper sometimes darkened at a different rate than the centre. Tracing this to different proportions of salt and silver, he concluded that a strong solution of table salt defended the image against further action of light. He realized that his negatives could themselves be printed on sensitive paper, reversing the tones back to normal, and allowing the production of multiple prints from one negative.
By the end of , although he had already achieved a high degree of success, he desired to improve matters further before publication, and the knowledge of his discovery remained within his family. During the following three years, he was fully engaged in other optical studies and in refining his mathematical works. Although Talbot had little taste for politics, attending parliament faithfully but speaking infrequently, his retirement had not stopped his political life.
He then galvanized the council of the Linnean Society to petition the Commons. In , because of his investigations of crystals, he was invited to give the Bakerian lecture to the Royal Society.
By the start of he had published nearly thirty scientific papers and two books, with two more to follow within the year. During November Talbot finally returned to his photographic experiments and started drawing up a paper for presentation to the Royal Society. A young English gentleman on his honeymoon sat sketching by the shore of Lake Como early in October , one eye pressed close to a camera lucida.
It seemed a simple task to trace the features of the village buildings, lake, and distant mountains with his pencil. The would-be artist was William Henry Fox Talbot — His intellectual curiosity embraced the fields of mathematics, chemistry, astronomy , and botany; philosophy and philology; Egyptology, the classics, and art history.
He had published four books and twenty-seven scholarly articles on a variety of subjects and was a fellow of the Astronomical, Linnean, and Royal Societies. Amid shopping lists and daily reminders, he filled his pocket diaries with the titles of books to read, complex mathematical formulas, and notations of experiments and experiences. The camera obscura, too, had left Talbot with unsatisfactory results, but it was not his own feeble drawings that he remembered after a decade.
Talbot jotted down thoughts about experiments he could conduct at home to see if Nature, through the action of light on material substances, might be brought to draw her own picture. In January , Talbot returned home to Lacock Abbey, an amalgamation of buildings incorporating the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century remains of a former abbey about eighty-five miles west of London.
Within a few months, he began to experiment with the idea that had occurred to him at Lake Como and soon found that a sheet of fine writing paper, coated with salt and brushed with a solution of silver nitrate, darkened in the sun, and that a second coating of salt impeded further darkening or fading.
After exposure the paper was again washed with the gallo silver nitrate, then a hot solution of hypo was used as a fixative. A positive print could now be made on paper treated with silver chloride. Thus, Talbot became the creator of negative-positive photography. Talbot published the first book illustrated with photographs in The book, titled The Pencil of Nature, contains 24 photographs of genre scenes of everyday life and a text of predictions and ambitions for the art of photography.
The Pencil of Nature was the precursor of the beautiful coffee table books enjoyed today; there are fifteen copies in existence, two may be found in the museum at Lacock Abby.
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