The Evolution of Photography: With a Chronological Record of Discoveries, Inventions, Etc., Contributions to Photographic Literature, and Personal Reminescences Extending over Forty YearsWerge, John, active 1854-1890
History
The Evolution of Photography: With a Chronological Record of Discoveries, Inventions, Etc., Contributions to Photographic Literature, and Personal Reminescences Extending over Forty Years
Werge, John, active 1854-1890
Photography -- History
for which I had no redress. From Rochester I proceeded to Buffalo, where
I met with another instance of Yankee smartness of a different kind. I
had sold some colours to a man there who paid me in dollar bills, the
usual currency of the country, but when I tendered one of these bills
for payment at the hotel, it was refused. I next offered it on board a
steamboat, but there it was also declined. When I had an opportunity I
returned it to the man who gave it to me, and requested him to send me a
good one instead. He was honest enough to do that, and impudent enough
to tell me that he knew it was bad when he gave it to me, but as I was a
stranger he thought I might pass it off easily.
I next went to Niagara Falls, where it was my good fortune to encounter
two very different specimens of American character in the persons of Mr.
Easterly and Mr. Babbitt, the former a visitor and the latter a resident
Daguerrean, who held a monopoly from General Porter to Daguerreotype
the Falls and visitors. He had a pavilion on the American side of the
Falls, under which his camera was in position all day long, and when a
group of visitors stood on the shore to survey the Falls from that
point, he took the group--without their knowledge--and showed it to the
visitors before they left. In almost every instance he sold the picture
at a good price; the people were generally delighted to be taken at the
Falls. I need hardly say that they were all taken instantaneously, and
embraced a good general view, including the American Fall, Goat Island,
the Horse Shoe Fall, and the Canadian shore. Many of these views I
coloured for Mr. Babbitt, but there was always a beautiful green colour
on the brink of the Horse Shoe Fall which I never could match. For many
years I possessed one of Mr. Babbitt's Daguerreotype views, as well as
others taken by Mr. Easterly and myself, but I had the misfortune to be
deprived of them all by fire. Some years after I lent them to an
exhibition in Glasgow, which was burnt down, and all the exhibits
destroyed. After a delightful sojourn of three weeks at Niagara Falls, I
took steamer on the lower Niagara River, sailed down to Lake Ontario,
and down the River St. Lawrence, shooting the Lachine Rapids, and on to
Montreal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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