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
April 20th of this year Mr. J. A. Spencer died, after a lingering
illness, of cancer in the throat. Mr. Spencer was, at one period in the
history of photography, the largest manufacturer of albumenized paper in
this country, and carried on his business at Shepherd's Bush. In 1866 he
told me that he broke about 2,000 eggs daily, merely to obtain the
whites or albumen. The yolks being of no use to him, he sold them, when
he could, to glove makers, leather dressers, and confectioners, but they
could not consume all he offered for sale, and he buried the rest in his
garden until his neighbours complained of the nuisance, so that it
became ultimately a very difficult thing for him to dispose of his waste
yolks in any manner. After the introduction of Swan's improved carbon
process, he turned his attention to the manufacture of carbon tissue,
and in a short time he became one of the partners in the Autotype
Company, and the name of the firm at that period was Spencer, Sawyer,
and Bird; but he ceased to be a partner some time before his death.
At the South London Technical Meeting, held in the great hall of the
Society of Arts, I exhibited my non-actinic developing tray, and
developed a gelatine dry plate in the full blaze of gas-light. A short
extract from a leader in the _Photographic News_ of November 14th, 1879,
will be sufficient to satisfy all who are interested in the matter.
"Amongst the many ingenious appliances exhibited at the recent South
London meeting, none excited greater interest than the developing tray
of Mr. Werge, in which he developed in the full gas-light of the room a
gelatine plate which had been exposed in the morning, and exhibited to
the meeting the result in a clean transparency, without fog, or any
trace of the abnormal action of light.... We can here simply record the
fact, interesting to many, that the demonstration before the South
London meeting was a perfect success."
1880 had a rather melancholy beginning, for on January the 15th, Mr.
George Wharton Simpson died suddenly, which was a great shock to every
one that knew him. I had seen him only a few days before in his usual
good health, and he looked far more like outliving me than I him;
besides, he was a year my junior. The extract above quoted was the last
time he honoured me by mentioning my name in his writings, though he had
done so many times before, both pleasantly and in defending me against
some ill-natured and unwarrantable attacks in the journal which he so
ably conducted for twenty years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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