History, Modern -- 19th century; Nineteenth century
Wedgewood and Davy, in 1802, made prints on paper by means of silver
salts, but it was not until 1830 that Niepce and Daguerre founded
photography, which Arago, in an address to the French Chamber, at once
suggested might subsequently be used to record the positions of stars.
In 1839 we find Sir John Herschel carrying out a series of experiments
so important for our correct knowledge of the sequence of steps in the
early stages of photography that I have no hesitation in quoting from
one of Herschel’s manuscripts relating to a deposit on a glass plate
of “muriate” [chloride] of silver from a mixed solution of the nitrate
with common salt. The manuscript states: “After forty-eight hours [the
chloride] had formed a film firm enough to bear draining the water off
very slowly by a siphon. Having dried it, I found that it was very
little affected by light, and by washing it with nitrate of silver,
weak, and drying it, it became highly sensitive. In this state I took a
camera picture of the telescope on it.”
The original of the above-mentioned photograph, the first photograph
ever taken on glass, is now in the science collection at the Victoria
and Albert Museum, South Kensington.
In the early days of photography colored glasses were first used
to investigate the action of different colors on the photographic
plate. Sir John Herschel was among the first to propose that such
investigations should be made direct with a spectrum, and he, like Dr.
J. W. Draper, stated that he had found a new kind of light beyond the
blue end of the spectrum, as the photographic plate showed a portion of
the spectrum there which was not visible to the eye. Advance followed
advance, and in 1842 Becquerel photographed the whole solar spectrum,
in colors, with nearly all the lines registered by the hand and eye
of Fraunhofer, not only the blue end, but the complete spectrum, from
Draper’s “latent light,” as he called the ultra-violet rays, to the
extreme red end.
The first photograph of a celestial object was one of the moon, secured
by Dr. J. W. Draper in 1840; we had to wait till 1845, so far as I
know, before a daguerreotype was taken of the sun; this was done by
Foucault and Fizeau, while the first photograph of a star—Vega—was
taken at Harvard in 1850. After the introduction of the wet-collodion
process regular photography of the sun’s surface was commenced, at Sir
John Herschel’s recommendation, at Kew in 1858, and the total solar
eclipse of 1860 was made memorable by the photographs of De La Rue, who
before that time had secured most admirable photographs of the moon, as
also had Rutherfurd.
Photography now began to pay the debt she owed to spectrum analysis.
The first laboratory photograph of the spectra of the chemical elements
was taken by Dr. W. A. Miller in 1862.
Rutherfurd was the first to secure a photograph of the solar spectrum
with considerable dispersion by means of prisms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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