Today, let's look at some old pictures. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The camera was invented in
two stages. The camera obscura has been known for
2000 years. A camera obscura casts an image that an
artist can trace. One photographic tracing of that
kind shows us, quite accurately, what George
Washington looked like.
But we've only had means to record a camera's
picture for 160 years. Thomas Wedgwood -- son of
the great industrialist -- first recorded images on
a coat of silver nitrate. But his pictures were
only fleeting. He had no way to fix the image.
Two Frenchmen, Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre, finally gave us
permanent camera pictures in the early 1800's. The
engraver Niepce got there first when he spread a
bitumen slurry on a pewter plate. Prolonged
exposure to light made the bitumen water-soluble.
He washed away the soluble bitumen after he'd
exposed the plate in a camera. Then he etched the
pewter where it was uncovered.
Daguerre was a theatre set designer who made heavy
use of the camera obscura in his work. He too was
trying to find a way to record pictures. For
several years, he and Niepce sniffed at each other
like wary tomcats. Finally, in 1829, they decided
two heads were better than one, and they formed a
partnership.
Niepce died three years later, and Daguerre
eventually replaced the bitumen with silver iodide.
He gave us the Daguerreotype.
Niepce's first picture was a slightly fuzzy,
eight-hour exposure of the view from his apartment
window, made in 1826. The first Daguerreotypes
needed only 15 minutes of exposure. They date from
the latter 1830s, and they are handsome pictures.
We see faces that have been carved by harsher lives
than we live today. But even with people in them,
these first pictures are carefully composed still
lifes -- objects of art in classical poses.
By the 1860s things had changed. Exposures were
much quicker, and attitudes were less romantic. The
world was increasingly functional and industrial.
Photography turned to documentary reporting -- the
joining of the transcontinental railway, an
absolutely radiant young Sarah Bernhardt, a
wild-eyed Baudelaire. And another thread appears.
We see rotting corpses of Civil War dead and child
laborers in factories. We see the urban poor. By
the 1860s photography had become social commentary
and a self-conscious historical record.
Photography began as an unsolved technical problem
-- a teaser of the imagination. In just 30 years,
it had turned into an extension of our conscience.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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