The Invention of Photography

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2016

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the development of photography in the 1830s, when techniques for 'drawing with light' evolved to the stage where, in 1839, both Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot made claims for its invention. These followed the development of the camera obscura, and experiments by such as Thomas Wedgwood and Nicéphore Niépce, and led to rapid changes in the 1840s as more people captured images with the daguerreotype and calotype. These new techniques changed the aesthetics of the age and, before long, inspired claims that painting was now dead. With Simon Schaffer Professor of the History of Science at the University of Cambridge Elizabeth Edwards Emeritus Professor of Photographic History at De Montfort University And Alison Morrison-Low, Research Associate at National Museums Scotland Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about in our time and for
0:05.0	recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC in Our Time.
0:10.0	I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, in Paris in 1839, the digrotype was announced to the world.
0:17.0	Louis de Gere had found a way to capture images that went through a lens onto a screen in a sealed box and to preserve those images for others to see in another place and at another time.
0:29.0	This was the dawn of photography.
0:31.0	DeGaz was a great feat of chemistry, technology and showmanship and
0:34.8	drew on years of experiment with camera obscure going back to Da Vinci and
0:38.8	medieval China and on the work of scientists who knew some chemicals reacted to light
0:43.4	but didn't know how to preserve those changes.
0:46.0	It was said DAGRATYves had, quote,
0:48.0	realized a dream that had been dreamt for a long time,
0:51.0	a way of making nature make images of itself."
0:55.0	There were more of a nightmare for Henry Fox Tolbert in England who'd been working on a very different way of capturing images and rushed to make his discoveries known too.
1:03.0	With me to discuss the invention of photography
1:05.0	are Simon Schaefer, Professor of the History of Science
1:08.0	at the University of Cambridge.
1:10.0	Elizabeth Edwards,
1:11.0	Emeritus Professor of Photographic History at Montford University, and Allison
1:15.8	Morrison Lowe, research associate at the National Museum's Scotland.
1:20.3	Simon Schaffa, much was known before to go about light and lenses.
1:24.0	So let's start with the idea of a camera.
1:26.0	What's meant by that word?
	...

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