1
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:09,520
Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, everybody,

2
00:00:09,520 --> 00:00:12,400
Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm

3
00:00:12,480 --> 00:00:17,640
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and we're back to discuss more optical recording technology.

4
00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:22,040
Speaker 1: Last time we talked about the camera obscura, right, Yeah,

5
00:00:22,079 --> 00:00:27,000
Speaker 1: and a necessary precursor to true photographic technology. Yeah. So,

6
00:00:27,080 --> 00:00:29,840
Speaker 1: from like the writings of Master Mo in ancient China

7
00:00:30,040 --> 00:00:33,760
Speaker 1: to the experiments of Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci,

8
00:00:34,479 --> 00:00:37,760
Speaker 1: the camera obscura has been this fascinating way that people

9
00:00:37,880 --> 00:00:41,760
Speaker 1: discovered to take an image of the ever changing three

10
00:00:41,840 --> 00:00:45,120
Speaker 1: D world outside and project it onto a two D

11
00:00:45,280 --> 00:00:48,360
Speaker 1: surface inside a box, either just through a pinhole or

12
00:00:48,400 --> 00:00:51,680
Speaker 1: focused with the lens or with a mirror. Yeah, essentially

13
00:00:52,040 --> 00:00:56,840
Speaker 1: externalizing sight to a certain extent, like taking uh, something

14
00:00:56,920 --> 00:00:59,560
Speaker 1: of what it is to see the world and uh

15
00:00:59,560 --> 00:01:01,960
Speaker 1: and car having it away from reality, projecting it on

16
00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:04,280
Speaker 1: the wall and uh and allowing us to see it

17
00:01:04,319 --> 00:01:07,480
Speaker 1: there instead. Yeah. Well, it's it's making site a new

18
00:01:07,600 --> 00:01:11,160
Speaker 1: kind of thing. I mean, otherwise, site is seeing the

19
00:01:11,200 --> 00:01:13,880
Speaker 1: three D world and putting an image of the world

20
00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:17,240
Speaker 1: on a wall that does sort of suggest to you

21
00:01:17,360 --> 00:01:19,840
Speaker 1: a new way that things could be like the idea,

22
00:01:20,200 --> 00:01:23,040
Speaker 1: like a real image of the real world being just

23
00:01:23,160 --> 00:01:25,880
Speaker 1: like a painting, something that you could, you know, move

24
00:01:25,920 --> 00:01:29,920
Speaker 1: around and make copies of. And so the camera obscura

25
00:01:30,160 --> 00:01:34,680
Speaker 1: did not constitute photography. It's sort of half of the story, right,

26
00:01:34,720 --> 00:01:38,200
Speaker 1: because photography has to do two things. Number one, it

27
00:01:38,240 --> 00:01:40,959
Speaker 1: has to focus an image of the world on a

28
00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:43,800
Speaker 1: two D surface. But number two, it has to make

29
00:01:43,920 --> 00:01:47,240
Speaker 1: that image permanent, to fix the image so that it

30
00:01:47,360 --> 00:01:50,760
Speaker 1: stays after the source of the light has gone away, right,

31
00:01:50,800 --> 00:01:54,760
Speaker 1: like in a flint Stone's world. I suppose you could

32
00:01:54,760 --> 00:01:58,160
Speaker 1: have a camera that consists of a camera obscura, and

33
00:01:58,200 --> 00:02:02,000
Speaker 1: then there's a small of terra sa something inside the

34
00:02:02,040 --> 00:02:05,360
Speaker 1: camera box that then traces everything, and then that would

35
00:02:05,400 --> 00:02:09,040
Speaker 1: be your photograph. But it's how we get that terrasaar

36
00:02:09,240 --> 00:02:12,680
Speaker 1: tracing the upside down vision of a of a park

37
00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:15,240
Speaker 1: h That is where we get into the like the

38
00:02:15,280 --> 00:02:19,760
Speaker 1: true technology, the true invention of modern photography, exactly right.

39
00:02:19,800 --> 00:02:22,080
Speaker 1: So we we've got the camera obscure, we've got the

40
00:02:22,080 --> 00:02:24,600
Speaker 1: technology to focus an image on a two D surface

41
00:02:24,680 --> 00:02:27,359
Speaker 1: using a pinhole or a lens. But the question is

42
00:02:27,400 --> 00:02:30,239
Speaker 1: how to make it permanent, how to fix the image.

43
00:02:30,360 --> 00:02:32,600
Speaker 1: The camera obscured does the first half, but how do

44
00:02:32,680 --> 00:02:35,080
Speaker 1: we get to the second? And I wanted to go

45
00:02:35,120 --> 00:02:36,960
Speaker 1: ahead and mention a book that I'm going to be

46
00:02:37,000 --> 00:02:39,640
Speaker 1: referring to, probably over the next several episodes that we

47
00:02:39,720 --> 00:02:42,560
Speaker 1: do on the history of photography. This is a book

48
00:02:42,560 --> 00:02:45,480
Speaker 1: I've been reading and really enjoying called Capturing the Light

49
00:02:45,760 --> 00:02:49,200
Speaker 1: The Birth of Photography, A true Story of Genius and Rivalry,

50
00:02:49,240 --> 00:02:52,440
Speaker 1: by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport. Now, this book focuses

51
00:02:52,680 --> 00:02:56,400
Speaker 1: on the two main people who are actually credited as

52
00:02:56,480 --> 00:02:59,720
Speaker 1: the inventors of photography in the modern sense, and that

53
00:02:59,720 --> 00:03:03,040
Speaker 1: would be Louis de Guerre and Henry Fox Talbot. We're

54
00:03:03,040 --> 00:03:05,280
Speaker 1: not going to quite get to them today because today

55
00:03:05,280 --> 00:03:09,320
Speaker 1: we wanted to focus on photographic technology that came before them,

56
00:03:09,360 --> 00:03:13,280
Speaker 1: what was almost photography but not quite. But actually the

57
00:03:13,320 --> 00:03:16,520
Speaker 1: title of the book comes from a quote that Louis

58
00:03:16,600 --> 00:03:18,720
Speaker 1: de Gare the the inventor of the de guara type,

59
00:03:18,720 --> 00:03:21,200
Speaker 1: who will talk about more in the next episode, something

60
00:03:21,240 --> 00:03:24,320
Speaker 1: he wrote in a letter to Charles Chevalier in eighteen

61
00:03:24,360 --> 00:03:27,359
Speaker 1: thirty nine when he had made this discovery of how

62
00:03:27,400 --> 00:03:30,800
Speaker 1: to really finally trap the image and what he said.

63
00:03:30,840 --> 00:03:33,200
Speaker 1: This is translated from the French. He said, I have

64
00:03:33,400 --> 00:03:37,320
Speaker 1: captured the light and arrested its flight. The sun itself

65
00:03:37,400 --> 00:03:41,040
Speaker 1: shall draw my pictures. Oh wow, that's beautiful. It is beautiful.

66
00:03:41,080 --> 00:03:43,960
Speaker 1: It sounds almost kind of grandiose and diabolical. It makes

67
00:03:44,000 --> 00:03:45,480
Speaker 1: the hair on the back of my next stand up

68
00:03:45,480 --> 00:03:47,960
Speaker 1: a bit. Hey. When we were talking about inventions and

69
00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:50,360
Speaker 1: we have to talk about inventors, and you know, sometimes

70
00:03:50,400 --> 00:03:51,920
Speaker 1: we can get a little carried away, you know, I

71
00:03:51,960 --> 00:03:55,720
Speaker 1: wanted to read a quote from Watson and Rappaport's book

72
00:03:55,920 --> 00:04:00,200
Speaker 1: where they're talking about the the intellectual uh background to

73
00:04:00,360 --> 00:04:03,960
Speaker 1: the era of photography before photography came around, and the

74
00:04:04,080 --> 00:04:07,640
Speaker 1: writing about the influence of Isaac Newton. So they're discussing

75
00:04:07,760 --> 00:04:10,480
Speaker 1: quote Isaac Newton's seminal work on the subject during the

76
00:04:10,520 --> 00:04:13,840
Speaker 1: sixteen seventies, which culminated in the publication in seventeen o

77
00:04:13,960 --> 00:04:18,560
Speaker 1: four of his Optics. In it, Newton unknowingly predicted the

78
00:04:18,600 --> 00:04:23,200
Speaker 1: science of photochemistry when he remarked that quote, the changing

79
00:04:23,240 --> 00:04:27,839
Speaker 1: of bodies into light and light into bodies is very

80
00:04:27,880 --> 00:04:32,680
Speaker 1: conformable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutation.

81
00:04:33,279 --> 00:04:35,159
Speaker 1: And this is great in multiple ways, because he's talking

82
00:04:35,160 --> 00:04:38,360
Speaker 1: about the idea that light could itself make a physical

83
00:04:38,480 --> 00:04:41,719
Speaker 1: change in matter. Right, that that's what happens in a photograph.

84
00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:45,520
Speaker 1: You're changing something in a fixed material object just by

85
00:04:45,560 --> 00:04:50,000
Speaker 1: exposure to light. And that's like the key chemistry behind photography.

86
00:04:50,040 --> 00:04:53,520
Speaker 1: But also when he talks about transmutation, the authors note

87
00:04:53,520 --> 00:04:56,280
Speaker 1: that this is in a way a nod towards alchemy,

88
00:04:56,360 --> 00:05:00,800
Speaker 1: and that Newton was this important bridge between the magicians

89
00:05:00,920 --> 00:05:03,640
Speaker 1: of old and the scientists of the new world. He

90
00:05:03,760 --> 00:05:06,400
Speaker 1: was sort of the last of the medieval magicians and

91
00:05:06,440 --> 00:05:11,080
Speaker 1: alchemists and the first of the modern scientists. Yeah. One

92
00:05:11,120 --> 00:05:12,960
Speaker 1: thing I think we'll probably touch on again and again

93
00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:16,279
Speaker 1: and all of this is that the photochemical nature of

94
00:05:16,480 --> 00:05:20,000
Speaker 1: photography uh and and, combined with lenses and all, it

95
00:05:20,040 --> 00:05:23,120
Speaker 1: does sound seem very magical. But in our age of

96
00:05:23,120 --> 00:05:27,080
Speaker 1: of digital photography and uh and and cell phone pictures,

97
00:05:27,120 --> 00:05:29,680
Speaker 1: it's easy to forget that that. Yeah, you had what

98
00:05:29,800 --> 00:05:34,920
Speaker 1: at heart was a chemical and an optical process. Yeah,

99
00:05:35,120 --> 00:05:38,400
Speaker 1: and why does Why would it be that photography is

100
00:05:38,400 --> 00:05:42,360
Speaker 1: anymore scientifically plausible than these fools errands of the alchemists,

101
00:05:42,440 --> 00:05:45,200
Speaker 1: like changing lead into gold. Right, you know that that

102
00:05:45,440 --> 00:05:47,839
Speaker 1: seems from a from a vantage point where you don't

103
00:05:47,880 --> 00:05:50,159
Speaker 1: know enough about chemistry to say, well, they're they're just

104
00:05:50,200 --> 00:05:54,719
Speaker 1: sort of like equally fanciful chemical imaginings, right, And and

105
00:05:54,760 --> 00:05:57,920
Speaker 1: some of the pre photographic processes that we're going to

106
00:05:58,000 --> 00:06:00,839
Speaker 1: discuss here they do sound like some sort of an

107
00:06:00,839 --> 00:06:03,839
Speaker 1: occult ritual. Oh yeah, I love this stuff. I can't

108
00:06:03,880 --> 00:06:06,120
Speaker 1: wait to get to it. So, uh, picking up on

109
00:06:06,160 --> 00:06:07,480
Speaker 1: what we talked about with the last time with the

110
00:06:07,520 --> 00:06:10,560
Speaker 1: camera obscure. Of course, the camera obscura was known very

111
00:06:10,600 --> 00:06:13,480
Speaker 1: well to the scientific thinkers of like the Enlightenment era,

112
00:06:13,800 --> 00:06:16,400
Speaker 1: and in the eighteenth century there was a steady increase

113
00:06:16,440 --> 00:06:20,400
Speaker 1: in interest in whether the kinds of images projected in

114
00:06:20,440 --> 00:06:24,600
Speaker 1: a camera obscura could somehow be fixed or made permanent.

115
00:06:24,880 --> 00:06:26,599
Speaker 1: This is something that came to mind for a lot

116
00:06:26,640 --> 00:06:28,360
Speaker 1: of people, but they couldn't figure out how to do

117
00:06:28,440 --> 00:06:31,040
Speaker 1: it right, because, as I mentioned earlier, you could have

118
00:06:31,120 --> 00:06:34,680
Speaker 1: a flint stone situation where some sort of small dinosaur

119
00:06:34,880 --> 00:06:38,640
Speaker 1: terrasaar then traces everything and creates an image. And we

120
00:06:38,680 --> 00:06:42,160
Speaker 1: did discuss in the in the Camerascura episode how some

121
00:06:42,240 --> 00:06:48,719
Speaker 1: individuals allegedly and in other cases certainly did use the

122
00:06:48,800 --> 00:06:53,480
Speaker 1: camera obscura to trace images and ultimately create works of

123
00:06:53,640 --> 00:06:58,120
Speaker 1: more traditional art. Yeah, da Vinci, I think, but possibly Vermeer, right, Yeah,

124
00:06:58,200 --> 00:07:02,160
Speaker 1: that's the theory anyway. But to have an actual chemical

125
00:07:02,240 --> 00:07:05,560
Speaker 1: process that makes this possible without the need of of

126
00:07:05,600 --> 00:07:10,000
Speaker 1: a mer or a cartoon dinosaur, that is the That's

127
00:07:10,040 --> 00:07:12,760
Speaker 1: the key area of development that we're gonna be discussing today,

128
00:07:12,800 --> 00:07:17,480
Speaker 1: to make a light capturing machine, something that automatically captures

129
00:07:17,480 --> 00:07:22,080
Speaker 1: an image of the natural world. Absolutely. Now, in all

130
00:07:22,120 --> 00:07:24,080
Speaker 1: of our episodes of invention, we we do try to

131
00:07:24,120 --> 00:07:26,960
Speaker 1: begin with a discussion of what came before, and we

132
00:07:26,960 --> 00:07:29,080
Speaker 1: we have a whole episode on the camera Obscureau which

133
00:07:29,080 --> 00:07:31,240
Speaker 1: gets into a lot of this. But I do want

134
00:07:31,240 --> 00:07:35,800
Speaker 1: to drive home just a few additional highlights to emphasize

135
00:07:35,880 --> 00:07:41,400
Speaker 1: just the importance of photography and why photography is ultimately

136
00:07:41,440 --> 00:07:45,600
Speaker 1: one of the most important technological, artistic, and cultural advancements

137
00:07:45,600 --> 00:07:48,800
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century. So for starters in the pre

138
00:07:48,920 --> 00:07:52,480
Speaker 1: photographic world, unless you could afford a painter or craft

139
00:07:52,560 --> 00:07:56,360
Speaker 1: such art yourself, you could only rely on fragile memories

140
00:07:56,400 --> 00:07:58,880
Speaker 1: of friends and loved ones, uh in in order to

141
00:07:58,880 --> 00:08:02,640
Speaker 1: remember what they like. Both how living individuals looked in

142
00:08:02,640 --> 00:08:05,480
Speaker 1: the past when they were young, and how the departed

143
00:08:05,560 --> 00:08:08,720
Speaker 1: looked when they were still alive. So, you know, think

144
00:08:08,880 --> 00:08:12,040
Speaker 1: think about this. How fixed are your memories of your

145
00:08:12,080 --> 00:08:15,040
Speaker 1: loved ones appearances? Like, really think about it. Is it

146
00:08:15,080 --> 00:08:17,200
Speaker 1: a you know? Is it a is it a definite

147
00:08:17,280 --> 00:08:20,320
Speaker 1: solid thing? Or you perhaps remembering things just say a

148
00:08:20,320 --> 00:08:24,440
Speaker 1: little to the left of reality, you know, or are

149
00:08:24,480 --> 00:08:26,720
Speaker 1: you simply In many cases, I find myself doing this.

150
00:08:26,840 --> 00:08:31,280
Speaker 1: Am I remembering photographs of people or rather than really remembering, uh,

151
00:08:31,320 --> 00:08:34,520
Speaker 1: you know, an intense study of their facial features. I

152
00:08:34,600 --> 00:08:38,560
Speaker 1: have a potentially sort of crazy idea about this, just

153
00:08:38,640 --> 00:08:42,200
Speaker 1: something to wonder about. I wonder if it's possible that

154
00:08:42,280 --> 00:08:47,520
Speaker 1: actually lots of exposure to photographs of one's younger self

155
00:08:48,320 --> 00:08:54,320
Speaker 1: could potentially psychologically delay the process of maturing. Like that

156
00:08:54,480 --> 00:08:58,560
Speaker 1: you could potentially have a longer experience of feeling like

157
00:08:58,640 --> 00:09:01,800
Speaker 1: I am a child, I am a young person because

158
00:09:02,000 --> 00:09:05,320
Speaker 1: you are constantly seeing images of what you looked like

159
00:09:05,480 --> 00:09:08,760
Speaker 1: when you were younger. Interesting, Yeah, I'm not sure about that,

160
00:09:08,800 --> 00:09:10,640
Speaker 1: but I think that's something to consider. I mean, this

161
00:09:10,720 --> 00:09:12,840
Speaker 1: is the thing that's often been commented on that, you know,

162
00:09:13,040 --> 00:09:16,560
Speaker 1: like in in wealthy societies, with modern technology, there seems

163
00:09:16,600 --> 00:09:19,040
Speaker 1: to be a sort of like growing of the age

164
00:09:19,040 --> 00:09:22,040
Speaker 1: of adolescence. People feel like they are young for more

165
00:09:22,120 --> 00:09:25,679
Speaker 1: of their lives and like they become an adult later. Right,

166
00:09:26,240 --> 00:09:28,800
Speaker 1: And you know, I wonder if something playing a role

167
00:09:28,840 --> 00:09:33,079
Speaker 1: in this is just constant exposure to very reliable media

168
00:09:33,240 --> 00:09:36,199
Speaker 1: reflecting what you were like and what you were doing

169
00:09:36,280 --> 00:09:39,280
Speaker 1: when you were young. Well, and as as the father

170
00:09:39,440 --> 00:09:41,800
Speaker 1: of a six almost seven year old, I can tell

171
00:09:41,840 --> 00:09:43,480
Speaker 1: you that they do love to look at photographs of

172
00:09:43,520 --> 00:09:46,640
Speaker 1: themselves and of course hear stories about themselves. And and

173
00:09:46,679 --> 00:09:48,559
Speaker 1: I look back on, you know, my own childhood. I

174
00:09:48,600 --> 00:09:52,120
Speaker 1: remember being exposed to photo out physical photo albums a lot,

175
00:09:52,480 --> 00:09:54,400
Speaker 1: and uh and you know, we had photos hanging on

176
00:09:54,400 --> 00:09:56,440
Speaker 1: the walls and so forth. You know, you you grow

177
00:09:56,520 --> 00:09:59,240
Speaker 1: up in a photographic world. Yeah. Well, anyway, I'm not

178
00:09:59,240 --> 00:10:02,600
Speaker 1: convinced to that. It's just some possibility to think about. Yeah, basically,

179
00:10:02,760 --> 00:10:06,400
Speaker 1: I think it is important not to underestimate the power

180
00:10:06,440 --> 00:10:09,439
Speaker 1: of photography on just the way we think about ourselves,

181
00:10:09,440 --> 00:10:11,679
Speaker 1: our lives, and our loved ones. Absolutely not. I mean,

182
00:10:11,760 --> 00:10:15,800
Speaker 1: it completely changed the world. You can't overstate it. Now.

183
00:10:15,840 --> 00:10:19,480
Speaker 1: Another example would be the cataloging of fauna and flora

184
00:10:19,559 --> 00:10:23,480
Speaker 1: of the natural world. Before photographs, one only had descriptions

185
00:10:23,520 --> 00:10:26,000
Speaker 1: and drawings to go on. Can you imagine that? Like,

186
00:10:26,080 --> 00:10:29,360
Speaker 1: how if you wanted to be a naturalist, you know,

187
00:10:29,520 --> 00:10:33,120
Speaker 1: Charles Starwin type or something. Before photography, it was a

188
00:10:33,160 --> 00:10:36,600
Speaker 1: really important skill to be good at drawing, right, and

189
00:10:36,960 --> 00:10:39,040
Speaker 1: or to have access to someone who's good at it.

190
00:10:39,120 --> 00:10:41,560
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not good at drawing. I couldn't have

191
00:10:41,640 --> 00:10:44,439
Speaker 1: done it. Yeah, and and so yeah, when you introduce

192
00:10:45,440 --> 00:10:48,360
Speaker 1: writing or art into the scenario, you know, both are

193
00:10:48,720 --> 00:10:52,040
Speaker 1: highly subject to user error. Um and uh. You know,

194
00:10:52,080 --> 00:10:54,400
Speaker 1: despite the fact that we do have plenty of impressive

195
00:10:54,440 --> 00:10:59,560
Speaker 1: examples of of arts and descriptions from you know, from

196
00:10:59,640 --> 00:11:02,720
Speaker 1: natural list, you know, throughout history, but still we also

197
00:11:02,760 --> 00:11:05,439
Speaker 1: have some pretty bad examples to you know, where it's

198
00:11:05,440 --> 00:11:08,040
Speaker 1: like a game of telephone to describe what a line

199
00:11:08,080 --> 00:11:10,200
Speaker 1: looks like, it's etcetera. Yeah, we'll think about all those

200
00:11:10,240 --> 00:11:13,199
Speaker 1: drawings from the Middle Ages, like drawing of a drawing

201
00:11:13,240 --> 00:11:16,800
Speaker 1: of a rhinoceros, you know, yours rhinoceros. Yeah, we get

202
00:11:16,800 --> 00:11:18,640
Speaker 1: into this in an episode of Stuff to Plow your mind.

203
00:11:18,640 --> 00:11:20,920
Speaker 1: But it looks like what would happen if the idea

204
00:11:20,920 --> 00:11:24,120
Speaker 1: of our rhinoceros made it with a suit of armor. Yeah,

205
00:11:24,280 --> 00:11:25,880
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's got a kind of like a

206
00:11:26,000 --> 00:11:29,600
Speaker 1: tool album cover kind of d m T thing going on. Yeah,

207
00:11:29,640 --> 00:11:31,679
Speaker 1: it's a it's a wonderful image, but it's not quite

208
00:11:31,679 --> 00:11:35,240
Speaker 1: a rhino. Likewise, this would have placed you know, similar

209
00:11:35,240 --> 00:11:41,720
Speaker 1: constraints on anything regarding geographic data, military intelligence, and even

210
00:11:41,880 --> 00:11:46,000
Speaker 1: you know, pre photographic journalistic enterprises. You know, any attempt

211
00:11:46,200 --> 00:11:50,880
Speaker 1: to relay what was going on in another area, another

212
00:11:50,880 --> 00:11:52,840
Speaker 1: part of the world, anything that you couldn't see with

213
00:11:52,920 --> 00:11:56,640
Speaker 1: your eyes. Essentially, everything you understood about the world beyond

214
00:11:56,720 --> 00:11:59,880
Speaker 1: your bubble of experience was limited by the power of

215
00:12:00,080 --> 00:12:04,520
Speaker 1: written word and individuals artistic ability and the objectivity and

216
00:12:04,559 --> 00:12:08,680
Speaker 1: accuracy of the writer or artist or storyteller. Uh, and

217
00:12:08,800 --> 00:12:11,360
Speaker 1: the visual processing power of your own mind. And then

218
00:12:11,440 --> 00:12:14,400
Speaker 1: turn what they have given you into some uh you know,

219
00:12:14,559 --> 00:12:16,800
Speaker 1: vision of reality. And I think and I think that's

220
00:12:16,880 --> 00:12:19,600
Speaker 1: that's that's really really key. You know, it's easy to

221
00:12:19,600 --> 00:12:22,480
Speaker 1: take for granted today that I can take something like Egypt.

222
00:12:22,720 --> 00:12:25,280
Speaker 1: I've never been to Egypt, so I've never seen, you know,

223
00:12:25,320 --> 00:12:28,120
Speaker 1: the wonders of the pyramid. I've never seen what life

224
00:12:28,160 --> 00:12:30,280
Speaker 1: consists of. You know, there's wonderful. One of my favorite

225
00:12:30,280 --> 00:12:32,720
Speaker 1: things about traveling is just seeing what life seems to

226
00:12:32,720 --> 00:12:37,160
Speaker 1: consist of for for everyday residents of a particular area.

227
00:12:37,679 --> 00:12:40,240
Speaker 1: I have not seen any of those things in person,

228
00:12:40,760 --> 00:12:44,199
Speaker 1: uh in Egypt, but I have seen photographs, and of

229
00:12:44,280 --> 00:12:46,600
Speaker 1: course I've seen you know, the moving image as well.

230
00:12:46,640 --> 00:12:50,040
Speaker 1: But but just the power of photographs make those things

231
00:12:50,160 --> 00:12:57,200
Speaker 1: real in a way that descriptions and drawings um sometimes

232
00:12:57,240 --> 00:13:00,680
Speaker 1: struggle to recreate absolutely. But then take that, take that

233
00:13:00,760 --> 00:13:04,000
Speaker 1: same principle and and shrink it down in scale and scope,

234
00:13:04,520 --> 00:13:06,880
Speaker 1: So now you're not even talking about stuff all over

235
00:13:06,920 --> 00:13:10,040
Speaker 1: the world, stuff you're removed from in vast amounts of time.

236
00:13:10,679 --> 00:13:13,560
Speaker 1: Think about the way that it's necessary just to show

237
00:13:13,840 --> 00:13:17,360
Speaker 1: you something that you weren't there for yesterday, the way

238
00:13:17,400 --> 00:13:21,040
Speaker 1: it's now used to completely document life. Yeah, I mean,

239
00:13:21,240 --> 00:13:25,120
Speaker 1: for example, think about cell phone cameras now, like that's

240
00:13:25,160 --> 00:13:28,160
Speaker 1: just how ubiquitous has become. Most of us have a

241
00:13:28,240 --> 00:13:31,600
Speaker 1: camera on our bodies at all times that we can

242
00:13:31,600 --> 00:13:34,760
Speaker 1: whip out and record anything. You don't remember what your

243
00:13:34,920 --> 00:13:37,040
Speaker 1: license plate number is, well you just take a quick

244
00:13:37,040 --> 00:13:39,920
Speaker 1: picture of it. And then if that same automobile gets

245
00:13:39,920 --> 00:13:42,600
Speaker 1: in a fender bender, will you take a picture of it? Uh?

246
00:13:42,640 --> 00:13:45,600
Speaker 1: If you were to see Bigfoot or Ufo, well you

247
00:13:45,600 --> 00:13:48,120
Speaker 1: could conceivably take a picture of that as well. And

248
00:13:48,200 --> 00:13:51,520
Speaker 1: that's arguably one of the reasons there are perhaps fewer

249
00:13:52,000 --> 00:13:56,560
Speaker 1: fewer reported sightings of these things in our modern world. Yeah,

250
00:13:56,559 --> 00:13:58,520
Speaker 1: because now the question always be well, why didn't you

251
00:13:58,559 --> 00:14:00,640
Speaker 1: take a picture of it? Yeah, you have camera right there.

252
00:14:00,640 --> 00:14:02,840
Speaker 1: You have no excuse, right, I mean, I guess ghosts

253
00:14:02,880 --> 00:14:05,000
Speaker 1: canna get away with it because you can say, well,

254
00:14:05,080 --> 00:14:08,560
Speaker 1: the ghost didn't show up on camera. And yet uh,

255
00:14:09,240 --> 00:14:11,600
Speaker 1: you you look to you know, the early days of photography,

256
00:14:11,600 --> 00:14:13,160
Speaker 1: and you do see a lot of ghosts showing up

257
00:14:13,160 --> 00:14:16,160
Speaker 1: on camera. Because that's one of the other curious natures

258
00:14:16,160 --> 00:14:20,920
Speaker 1: about technology, Right, You introduce a new technology and um

259
00:14:21,000 --> 00:14:24,160
Speaker 1: it it it often makes room for new twists on

260
00:14:24,240 --> 00:14:28,320
Speaker 1: supernatural ideas. Yeah, it's not long before the occultists come knocking. Yeah,

261
00:14:28,360 --> 00:14:30,120
Speaker 1: we might have to come back to that on invention

262
00:14:30,200 --> 00:14:33,840
Speaker 1: for say Halloween episode to discuss how how the invention

263
00:14:33,880 --> 00:14:38,800
Speaker 1: of photography lead to how it influenced uh, supernatural and

264
00:14:38,840 --> 00:14:45,560
Speaker 1: spiritual ideas. Spirit photography totally the ectoplasm. Now, you know,

265
00:14:45,640 --> 00:14:49,040
Speaker 1: even now, photography was again one of the greatest cultural

266
00:14:49,080 --> 00:14:52,440
Speaker 1: and artistic shifts of the nineteenth century. However, as a

267
00:14:52,600 --> 00:14:56,880
Speaker 1: Peter Glossy, Associate curator in the Department of Photography at

268
00:14:56,920 --> 00:15:00,160
Speaker 1: the Museum of Modern Art, UM pointed out in his

269
00:15:00,240 --> 00:15:04,520
Speaker 1: book Before Photography, Painting and the Invention of Photography, photography

270
00:15:04,680 --> 00:15:07,880
Speaker 1: was quote not a bastard left by science on the

271
00:15:07,920 --> 00:15:11,640
Speaker 1: doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western

272
00:15:11,680 --> 00:15:14,560
Speaker 1: pictorial tradition. And I thought, I thought this was this

273
00:15:14,640 --> 00:15:17,840
Speaker 1: was very um, this is very insightful, and I think

274
00:15:17,840 --> 00:15:20,560
Speaker 1: something that's very important to keep in mind. Uh So,

275
00:15:20,720 --> 00:15:24,440
Speaker 1: basically the idea is that photography, yeah, didn't just come

276
00:15:24,440 --> 00:15:27,680
Speaker 1: out of nowhere. It wasn't just completely just dumped like this,

277
00:15:27,880 --> 00:15:31,040
Speaker 1: uh dumped on the doorstep here. Uh No, it came

278
00:15:31,080 --> 00:15:35,040
Speaker 1: on the heels of Renaissance strides in the invention of

279
00:15:35,160 --> 00:15:39,680
Speaker 1: linear perspective and the championing of vision, as as as

280
00:15:39,760 --> 00:15:44,080
Speaker 1: the basis of artistic representation. Photography came on the heels

281
00:15:44,120 --> 00:15:49,000
Speaker 1: of the many gradually formulated pictorial strategies. And you know

282
00:15:49,080 --> 00:15:52,680
Speaker 1: of this pre photographic shift in artistic tradition. So I

283
00:15:52,680 --> 00:15:54,480
Speaker 1: think that's important to to keep in mind. You don't

284
00:15:54,560 --> 00:15:58,200
Speaker 1: just throw painting away because you have photography now. You

285
00:15:58,280 --> 00:16:01,840
Speaker 1: keep painting, obviously, because painting is is beautiful and in

286
00:16:02,080 --> 00:16:05,400
Speaker 1: its many forms. But more to the point, you use

287
00:16:05,520 --> 00:16:09,160
Speaker 1: the lessons of this long developed artistic tradition to inform

288
00:16:09,320 --> 00:16:12,440
Speaker 1: how this new technology will be used not just to

289
00:16:12,480 --> 00:16:15,040
Speaker 1: take pictures of the world, but to induce a kind

290
00:16:15,080 --> 00:16:20,120
Speaker 1: of instant, hyper accurate, chemical painting of reality. Yeah. Absolutely,

291
00:16:20,160 --> 00:16:22,240
Speaker 1: and I mean, of course, there are several ways to

292
00:16:22,240 --> 00:16:25,280
Speaker 1: think about what you just said. I mean, one quite

293
00:16:25,280 --> 00:16:30,560
Speaker 1: clearly is that photography emerges from a tradition of art

294
00:16:30,560 --> 00:16:33,520
Speaker 1: appreciation and art creation. I mean, some of the figures

295
00:16:33,520 --> 00:16:36,120
Speaker 1: who were the most important in the early days of

296
00:16:36,160 --> 00:16:39,320
Speaker 1: photography were in the arts. There were people who were

297
00:16:39,360 --> 00:16:42,400
Speaker 1: accomplished as draftsmen, you know, people who were good at

298
00:16:42,680 --> 00:16:46,760
Speaker 1: drawing pictures and recreating perspective and stuff. And the idea

299
00:16:46,760 --> 00:16:50,520
Speaker 1: of photography was seen as an extension of that artistic project.

300
00:16:50,560 --> 00:16:53,840
Speaker 1: It wasn't just science and technology. I think from the

301
00:16:53,920 --> 00:16:57,040
Speaker 1: very beginning it was art absolutely, But maybe now we

302
00:16:57,080 --> 00:16:59,200
Speaker 1: should focus on the science and think a little bit

303
00:16:59,240 --> 00:17:02,000
Speaker 1: about Okay, so we have this problem of people have

304
00:17:02,040 --> 00:17:04,760
Speaker 1: the camera obscure. They've they've learned ways to take an

305
00:17:04,800 --> 00:17:07,800
Speaker 1: image of the outside world and projected onto a two

306
00:17:07,880 --> 00:17:10,640
Speaker 1: D surface. But how do you fix the image? How

307
00:17:10,680 --> 00:17:14,200
Speaker 1: do you get something to stay once you've projected it?

308
00:17:14,560 --> 00:17:16,720
Speaker 1: And and that's the thing we should explore next. What's

309
00:17:16,760 --> 00:17:20,760
Speaker 1: the chemistry behind the photography revolution? Alright, On that note,

310
00:17:20,760 --> 00:17:22,240
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break, and when we

311
00:17:22,320 --> 00:17:33,280
Speaker 1: come back, we're going to discuss Johann Heinrich Schultz. Alright,

312
00:17:33,320 --> 00:17:36,840
Speaker 1: we're back. Tell me about Mr Schultz, Robert Alright, Joan

313
00:17:37,040 --> 00:17:41,199
Speaker 1: Johann Heinrich Schultz born seven died seventeen forty four. He

314
00:17:41,280 --> 00:17:44,840
Speaker 1: was a German polly math, best remembered for his seventeen

315
00:17:44,880 --> 00:17:49,679
Speaker 1: seventeen experiments with silver nitrate, which, by the way, had

316
00:17:49,720 --> 00:17:54,359
Speaker 1: been discovered by Albertus Magnus Uh, you know, noted Um

317
00:17:54,480 --> 00:17:59,680
Speaker 1: uh thinker and tinker and uh an alchemist in that

318
00:17:59,760 --> 00:18:03,960
Speaker 1: they're teenth century. Magnus document documented, for instance, that nitric

319
00:18:04,000 --> 00:18:08,040
Speaker 1: acid could separate gold and silver by dissolving silver. Yeah.

320
00:18:08,040 --> 00:18:11,480
Speaker 1: So silver nitrate is chemically it's a g N O three,

321
00:18:11,520 --> 00:18:15,600
Speaker 1: it's silver. It's basically a silver salt. Yeah, and it's

322
00:18:15,600 --> 00:18:19,040
Speaker 1: a precursor to various other silver compounds, but Schiltz was

323
00:18:19,080 --> 00:18:22,359
Speaker 1: particularly interested in the way that various substances mixed with

324
00:18:22,400 --> 00:18:27,800
Speaker 1: silver nitrate darkened in sunlight. Albertus Magnus himself had noted

325
00:18:27,840 --> 00:18:31,760
Speaker 1: centuries earlier that silver nitrate could blacken the skin. That

326
00:18:31,840 --> 00:18:34,280
Speaker 1: reminds me of the murder victims in the name of

327
00:18:34,320 --> 00:18:37,119
Speaker 1: the Rose, who have had their fingertips blackened by an

328
00:18:37,160 --> 00:18:40,560
Speaker 1: unknown substance. That becomes part of the mystery. Yes, not

329
00:18:40,600 --> 00:18:43,480
Speaker 1: only blackened fingers, but black and tongue. He did not

330
00:18:43,640 --> 00:18:46,560
Speaker 1: write with his tongue. I presume I love the alchemy

331
00:18:46,640 --> 00:18:49,119
Speaker 1: type origins here. One thing is that silver nitrate was

332
00:18:49,160 --> 00:18:52,240
Speaker 1: also known uh was. Before it was widely known as

333
00:18:52,280 --> 00:18:54,840
Speaker 1: silver nitrate or nitrate of silver, it was known to

334
00:18:54,880 --> 00:18:58,800
Speaker 1: the alchemists as lunar caustic. This, of course because the

335
00:18:58,880 --> 00:19:02,800
Speaker 1: alchemists saw in action between silver and the moon. So

336
00:19:02,920 --> 00:19:05,719
Speaker 1: a G N O three is a corrosive silver salt,

337
00:19:06,000 --> 00:19:09,560
Speaker 1: and it actually has antimicrobial properties with some applications in

338
00:19:09,560 --> 00:19:12,880
Speaker 1: the history of medicine, to say disinfect or to kill

339
00:19:12,960 --> 00:19:16,920
Speaker 1: outer layers of cells on on some body surface. It's

340
00:19:16,960 --> 00:19:20,080
Speaker 1: of course poisonous if ingested, So do not drink silver

341
00:19:20,160 --> 00:19:24,760
Speaker 1: nitrate yeah, highly effective on werewolves eyes as well. Perhaps, Yeah,

342
00:19:24,760 --> 00:19:27,160
Speaker 1: but keep the lunar caustic out of your mouth. But again,

343
00:19:27,160 --> 00:19:30,720
Speaker 1: Schultz was mainly interested in this darkening that occurred in

344
00:19:30,760 --> 00:19:33,280
Speaker 1: exposure to the sunlight. Right, And in his day, the

345
00:19:33,320 --> 00:19:37,119
Speaker 1: main hypothesis was that that heat caused the change. But

346
00:19:37,240 --> 00:19:40,840
Speaker 1: in his experiments he found that silver nitrate dissolved into

347
00:19:40,880 --> 00:19:44,320
Speaker 1: a slurry of chalk and nitric acid darkened when exposed

348
00:19:44,359 --> 00:19:47,399
Speaker 1: to sunlight, but not when exposed to the heat of

349
00:19:47,400 --> 00:19:51,960
Speaker 1: a fire. So uh. In proving this out, he used

350
00:19:51,960 --> 00:19:55,800
Speaker 1: stencils of words, and he put them around, you know,

351
00:19:55,840 --> 00:19:59,000
Speaker 1: over the glass of a bottle of this mixture, and

352
00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:00,920
Speaker 1: then he sat them the the bottle in the sun

353
00:20:01,800 --> 00:20:04,520
Speaker 1: and this caused the surface of the contents to darken.

354
00:20:04,680 --> 00:20:07,560
Speaker 1: We're exposed to the sun, and this, given the stencils,

355
00:20:07,760 --> 00:20:11,480
Speaker 1: would cause the darkening to spell out the letters of

356
00:20:11,520 --> 00:20:14,520
Speaker 1: the stencils. Right, So you could make shapes appear in

357
00:20:14,560 --> 00:20:18,600
Speaker 1: this solution by selective exposure to sunlight. Right. Instead of

358
00:20:18,640 --> 00:20:22,280
Speaker 1: coloring in the stencil with a SHARPI or magic marker,

359
00:20:22,520 --> 00:20:25,240
Speaker 1: he's allowing this chemical process to do it when exposed

360
00:20:25,240 --> 00:20:27,520
Speaker 1: to sunlight. And then you could shake the bottle and

361
00:20:27,640 --> 00:20:31,280
Speaker 1: the dark the darkened area would go away like sketch. Yeah,

362
00:20:31,320 --> 00:20:34,160
Speaker 1: and you could do it again, or continued exposure would

363
00:20:34,160 --> 00:20:37,879
Speaker 1: erase them as well. At any rate, these were ephemeral.

364
00:20:38,320 --> 00:20:42,439
Speaker 1: He had no means of making the result permanent. Now

365
00:20:42,920 --> 00:20:47,720
Speaker 1: do these sun prints constitute photography? I think most people

366
00:20:47,760 --> 00:20:50,880
Speaker 1: would say no, But apparently some historians, willing to take

367
00:20:50,880 --> 00:20:54,320
Speaker 1: a really broad definition of photography, are willing to credit

368
00:20:54,320 --> 00:20:56,560
Speaker 1: Truls with the invention of photography, at least have in

369
00:20:56,600 --> 00:20:59,800
Speaker 1: the past. Um, you know, I imagine that's also of

370
00:21:00,040 --> 00:21:02,639
Speaker 1: he interests if you definitely want to make sure that um,

371
00:21:02,760 --> 00:21:06,040
Speaker 1: say a German has attributed to you know, you see

372
00:21:06,160 --> 00:21:08,400
Speaker 1: a lot of that at different times in history where

373
00:21:08,400 --> 00:21:11,720
Speaker 1: there is kind of a you know, um, a nationalist

374
00:21:12,240 --> 00:21:16,439
Speaker 1: interest or just a patriotic interest in attributing the inventor

375
00:21:16,480 --> 00:21:19,920
Speaker 1: of a particular technology. The thing is, no matter how

376
00:21:19,960 --> 00:21:23,760
Speaker 1: you shake it, no pun intended. Um, you know, Schultz

377
00:21:23,800 --> 00:21:27,600
Speaker 1: is still a key individual in the invention of photography.

378
00:21:27,920 --> 00:21:31,280
Speaker 1: This is clearly not photography, but but yeah, it is.

379
00:21:31,600 --> 00:21:35,040
Speaker 1: It is important what he discovered here about how you

380
00:21:35,080 --> 00:21:39,639
Speaker 1: could you know, project images onto silver nitrate solution? Right,

381
00:21:40,080 --> 00:21:42,680
Speaker 1: And you know, I believe we'll get into Thomas Wedgwood

382
00:21:42,680 --> 00:21:45,080
Speaker 1: and a Humphrey Davy later. But but they worked with

383
00:21:45,119 --> 00:21:48,840
Speaker 1: the creation of shadow images after Schultz's death. Uh, and

384
00:21:48,960 --> 00:21:51,520
Speaker 1: these two were impermanent. Okay, well, I think maybe we

385
00:21:51,520 --> 00:21:54,040
Speaker 1: should move on then to talk about Thomas Wedgewood and

386
00:21:54,080 --> 00:21:56,320
Speaker 1: Humphrey Dabut, But first I want to set the stage

387
00:21:56,359 --> 00:22:00,480
Speaker 1: about where these kind of discoveries came from. So in

388
00:22:00,520 --> 00:22:03,040
Speaker 1: the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was a

389
00:22:03,200 --> 00:22:08,560
Speaker 1: very important, very influential supper club for intellectuals that that

390
00:22:08,680 --> 00:22:12,480
Speaker 1: met once a month in Birmingham, England. And these guys

391
00:22:12,560 --> 00:22:17,879
Speaker 1: called themselves the Lunar Society or sometimes the Lunatics spelled

392
00:22:17,880 --> 00:22:21,200
Speaker 1: with a k uh, And this was because they arranged

393
00:22:21,240 --> 00:22:25,040
Speaker 1: their meetings according to the lunar calendar, hosting their dinners

394
00:22:25,040 --> 00:22:27,680
Speaker 1: on nights of the full moon. So this is already

395
00:22:27,720 --> 00:22:31,639
Speaker 1: conjuring some awesome druid connotations, like you expect them to

396
00:22:31,720 --> 00:22:34,040
Speaker 1: bring out the bulls and start hacking at some mistletoe.

397
00:22:34,160 --> 00:22:39,440
Speaker 1: But these were not occultists. They were intellectuals, natural philosophers, liberals,

398
00:22:39,440 --> 00:22:43,159
Speaker 1: and freethinkers, many of whom had a great interest in

399
00:22:43,200 --> 00:22:46,840
Speaker 1: the emerging sciences and reportedly the real reason they arranged

400
00:22:46,880 --> 00:22:49,359
Speaker 1: their meetings to coincide with the full moon is because

401
00:22:49,400 --> 00:22:52,119
Speaker 1: that made it easier to walk home afterwards. In the

402
00:22:52,160 --> 00:22:55,480
Speaker 1: absence of artificial lighting. One presumes them may have indulged

403
00:22:55,520 --> 00:22:58,320
Speaker 1: in a bit of wine or other spirits during their

404
00:22:58,400 --> 00:23:02,399
Speaker 1: lunar bacchanalia. Ever thought about that, that that rationale for

405
00:23:03,000 --> 00:23:08,280
Speaker 1: planning ones um drunken escapades in in in olden times.

406
00:23:08,520 --> 00:23:11,120
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, I wonder if this could be part

407
00:23:11,160 --> 00:23:14,239
Speaker 1: of the source of the idea that there's like, you know,

408
00:23:14,280 --> 00:23:17,080
Speaker 1: people are lunatics on nights of the full moon, that

409
00:23:17,119 --> 00:23:21,160
Speaker 1: there's this crazy behavior. Maybe it's because people plan that

410
00:23:21,320 --> 00:23:23,280
Speaker 1: night to get drunk because they know it will be

411
00:23:23,320 --> 00:23:26,160
Speaker 1: easier to walk home. And yeah, I mean I've heard

412
00:23:26,160 --> 00:23:27,960
Speaker 1: that the idea that's like, oh, on full moon, you

413
00:23:27,960 --> 00:23:30,800
Speaker 1: know the prowlers, they have more shadows to hide in

414
00:23:30,880 --> 00:23:33,280
Speaker 1: and that's why. But this this sounds like a more

415
00:23:33,359 --> 00:23:35,919
Speaker 1: realistic way to look at it, like, oh, it's just

416
00:23:36,200 --> 00:23:38,159
Speaker 1: this is the night when all the drunks are just

417
00:23:38,280 --> 00:23:40,439
Speaker 1: going at it because they know they're going to have

418
00:23:40,480 --> 00:23:42,640
Speaker 1: more light to stumble home by. Well, I don't want

419
00:23:42,640 --> 00:23:45,000
Speaker 1: to overture I don't know that heavy drinking is the

420
00:23:45,000 --> 00:23:47,520
Speaker 1: reason for them. But they, at least these people they enjoyed,

421
00:23:47,840 --> 00:23:51,280
Speaker 1: you know, having dinners and talking about discoveries and scientific

422
00:23:51,280 --> 00:23:55,040
Speaker 1: experiments and debating things and so. Prominent members of the

423
00:23:55,119 --> 00:23:59,399
Speaker 1: Lunatics Club included Erasmus Darwin, who was the patriarch of

424
00:23:59,400 --> 00:24:02,280
Speaker 1: the Darwin family, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. He was

425
00:24:02,320 --> 00:24:06,440
Speaker 1: a physician, a polly math, a freethinker, a slave trade abolitionist,

426
00:24:06,480 --> 00:24:09,879
Speaker 1: and even a poet, a truly larger than life figure

427
00:24:09,880 --> 00:24:12,080
Speaker 1: in many ways, like if you if you study, you know,

428
00:24:12,240 --> 00:24:14,960
Speaker 1: influential people in science and literature. At the time, it

429
00:24:15,000 --> 00:24:18,080
Speaker 1: seems like all roads lead back to Erasmus Darwin. And

430
00:24:18,080 --> 00:24:21,560
Speaker 1: Erasmus even actually worked out some prefigurations of the idea

431
00:24:21,560 --> 00:24:24,720
Speaker 1: of evolution and common descent in biology, but he never

432
00:24:24,760 --> 00:24:28,320
Speaker 1: put together a full coherent theory of evolution. That, of

433
00:24:28,359 --> 00:24:30,520
Speaker 1: course would be up to his grandson Charles, who came

434
00:24:30,600 --> 00:24:32,760
Speaker 1: up with the idea of natural selection, or at least,

435
00:24:32,760 --> 00:24:35,800
Speaker 1: you know, published the idea of natural selection. And one

436
00:24:35,840 --> 00:24:38,560
Speaker 1: thing I love is that Erasmus Darwin published too many

437
00:24:38,600 --> 00:24:43,159
Speaker 1: of his views about evolution and nature inverse, including in

438
00:24:43,160 --> 00:24:46,320
Speaker 1: a poem called the Temple of Nature, which was published

439
00:24:46,359 --> 00:24:49,840
Speaker 1: posthumously after Erasmus died in uh. It was published in

440
00:24:49,880 --> 00:24:52,840
Speaker 1: eighteen o four. I was perusing this poem because I've

441
00:24:52,840 --> 00:24:54,920
Speaker 1: never really read it before, and I noticed that some

442
00:24:55,000 --> 00:24:59,200
Speaker 1: lines of it preserve much of what we've explored already about,

443
00:24:59,240 --> 00:25:02,680
Speaker 1: For example, Roger Bacon's idea that the study of light

444
00:25:02,760 --> 00:25:05,840
Speaker 1: and optics was the flower of the whole of philosophy,

445
00:25:06,160 --> 00:25:08,600
Speaker 1: and that without it, none of the other sciences would

446
00:25:08,600 --> 00:25:13,560
Speaker 1: ever be understood. Kind of giving light a simultaneously theological

447
00:25:13,640 --> 00:25:18,399
Speaker 1: and scientific primacy in nature. Interesting. So, if you'll indulge me,

448
00:25:18,440 --> 00:25:20,159
Speaker 1: I just wanted to read a few lines from the

449
00:25:20,160 --> 00:25:24,680
Speaker 1: Temple of Nature. Erasmus Darwin writes, Immortal Love, who air

450
00:25:24,800 --> 00:25:28,440
Speaker 1: the morn of time on wings outstretched or chaos hung

451
00:25:28,520 --> 00:25:32,880
Speaker 1: Sublime warmed into life the bursting egg of night, and

452
00:25:32,960 --> 00:25:37,560
Speaker 1: gave young nature to admiring light. You whose wide arms

453
00:25:37,600 --> 00:25:41,879
Speaker 1: and soft embraces hurled around the vast frame, connect the

454
00:25:41,920 --> 00:25:45,919
Speaker 1: whirling world, whether immersed in day, the sun, You're throne.

455
00:25:46,240 --> 00:25:51,080
Speaker 1: You gird the planets in your silver zone. I thought so,

456
00:25:51,200 --> 00:25:54,840
Speaker 1: though apparently not everybody did. Apparently Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who

457
00:25:54,840 --> 00:25:57,120
Speaker 1: are you know, wrote the color Ridge wrote the Rhyme

458
00:25:57,119 --> 00:25:59,439
Speaker 1: and the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. He did not

459
00:25:59,560 --> 00:26:03,160
Speaker 1: like dar poetry. He apparently wrote about an earlier work

460
00:26:03,160 --> 00:26:07,000
Speaker 1: of Darwin's in the seventeen nineties quote, I absolutely nauseate

461
00:26:07,200 --> 00:26:10,119
Speaker 1: Darwin's poem. I don't know, maybe I'm a sucker. I

462
00:26:10,200 --> 00:26:12,760
Speaker 1: kind of liked it. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know,

463
00:26:12,800 --> 00:26:16,639
Speaker 1: it's no Kublican. But but what is right? Okay? But

464
00:26:16,720 --> 00:26:20,080
Speaker 1: other figures among the lunatics, you had James Watt, important

465
00:26:20,520 --> 00:26:23,440
Speaker 1: inventor of modifications to the principle of the steam engine.

466
00:26:23,520 --> 00:26:25,480
Speaker 1: He didn't invent the steam engine, but he was a

467
00:26:25,520 --> 00:26:28,080
Speaker 1: really important figure in its development. Oh yeah, And well,

468
00:26:28,240 --> 00:26:30,159
Speaker 1: I'm hoping we'll come back and discuss him in the

469
00:26:30,200 --> 00:26:33,720
Speaker 1: future as well. Absolutely. You also had Joseph Priestley, who

470
00:26:33,760 --> 00:26:37,440
Speaker 1: discovered and first described the properties of oxygen gas. Though

471
00:26:37,440 --> 00:26:41,720
Speaker 1: he didn't call it oxygen gas, he called it deflogisticated air.

472
00:26:42,400 --> 00:26:47,159
Speaker 1: Since he was working under the extremely incorrect flagistan theory,

473
00:26:47,600 --> 00:26:51,000
Speaker 1: which tried to explain various forms of chemical oxidation like

474
00:26:51,119 --> 00:26:55,840
Speaker 1: fire and rust by appealing to this hypothetical substance called flogistan,

475
00:26:56,520 --> 00:27:01,159
Speaker 1: which does not exist, but oxygen does, and Priestley's contributions

476
00:27:01,160 --> 00:27:04,040
Speaker 1: to the sciences would prove very important. But also his

477
00:27:04,280 --> 00:27:07,439
Speaker 1: like liberal politics like he supported the French Revolution, and

478
00:27:07,600 --> 00:27:11,840
Speaker 1: his dissenting theological views made him a target of public scorn,

479
00:27:11,920 --> 00:27:15,480
Speaker 1: which all culminated in the Birmingham Riots of seventeen ninety one,

480
00:27:15,480 --> 00:27:18,440
Speaker 1: also known as the Priestly Riots, where people who were

481
00:27:18,480 --> 00:27:21,399
Speaker 1: not a fan of Priestly or his ideas burned his house,

482
00:27:21,480 --> 00:27:26,080
Speaker 1: destroyed his laboratory, attacked his friends, and committed general mayhem.

483
00:27:26,080 --> 00:27:29,040
Speaker 1: But another one of these figures of the lunarmn or

484
00:27:29,080 --> 00:27:33,680
Speaker 1: the Lunatics was an industrialist and craftsman known as Josiah

485
00:27:33,800 --> 00:27:38,879
Speaker 1: Wedgewood who lived from seventeen thirty to seventeen and so.

486
00:27:39,000 --> 00:27:43,320
Speaker 1: Wedgewood was born the thirteen child of an impoverished family

487
00:27:43,440 --> 00:27:47,640
Speaker 1: in the pottery business, and a childhood case of smallpox

488
00:27:47,760 --> 00:27:50,720
Speaker 1: left him without the use of his right leg, which

489
00:27:50,800 --> 00:27:53,720
Speaker 1: later had to be amputated. And because he couldn't use

490
00:27:53,800 --> 00:27:56,560
Speaker 1: his leg, even though he was in a pottery family,

491
00:27:56,640 --> 00:27:59,800
Speaker 1: he was unable to work a potter's wheel, so in

492
00:28:00,040 --> 00:28:03,840
Speaker 1: that of making pieces himself, he focused on designing pottery

493
00:28:03,880 --> 00:28:07,880
Speaker 1: pieces and Josiah grew up to become an extremely successful

494
00:28:08,040 --> 00:28:12,320
Speaker 1: sort of empirical industrialist. He like he approached business with

495
00:28:12,359 --> 00:28:16,240
Speaker 1: a scientific frame of mind, and he designed and manufactured

496
00:28:16,280 --> 00:28:19,080
Speaker 1: pottery with a with a scientific approach to materials like

497
00:28:19,160 --> 00:28:23,680
Speaker 1: clays and glazes, and a scientific approach to manufacturing techniques

498
00:28:23,720 --> 00:28:27,199
Speaker 1: like Apparently his friend Joseph Priestley, who we were just

499
00:28:27,240 --> 00:28:30,359
Speaker 1: talking about, would help him with improvements in the chemistry

500
00:28:30,400 --> 00:28:34,160
Speaker 1: of pottery. And one of the techniques that Wedgewood's pottery

501
00:28:34,200 --> 00:28:37,639
Speaker 1: business employed was the use of the camera obscura, with

502
00:28:37,720 --> 00:28:42,320
Speaker 1: which they would create tracings of landscapes and country scenes

503
00:28:42,600 --> 00:28:46,640
Speaker 1: and then transfer them onto pottery pieces for decoration. And

504
00:28:46,760 --> 00:28:49,800
Speaker 1: like many of his friends among the lunatics, Wedgewood was

505
00:28:49,840 --> 00:28:52,760
Speaker 1: a political liberal and abolitionists. And on top of his

506
00:28:53,000 --> 00:28:56,960
Speaker 1: technical inventiveness in the pottery making and glazing process, Wedgwood

507
00:28:57,040 --> 00:29:00,960
Speaker 1: was apparently super innovative in business marketing. Of course, I

508
00:29:01,040 --> 00:29:02,840
Speaker 1: was reading a two thousand nine article in The New

509
00:29:02,880 --> 00:29:06,240
Speaker 1: York Times by Judith Flanders, who wrote, quote most if

510
00:29:06,280 --> 00:29:09,520
Speaker 1: not all, of the common techniques and twentieth century sales,

511
00:29:09,880 --> 00:29:15,440
Speaker 1: direct mail, money back guarantees, traveling salesman, self service, free

512
00:29:15,440 --> 00:29:19,760
Speaker 1: delivery by one get one free illustrated catalogs came from

513
00:29:19,840 --> 00:29:22,960
Speaker 1: Josiah Wedgwood. So when you next time you go for

514
00:29:23,040 --> 00:29:27,480
Speaker 1: your Bogo deal, you think about this potter. But anyway,

515
00:29:27,520 --> 00:29:30,360
Speaker 1: out of all this the you know, the Lunatic society,

516
00:29:30,560 --> 00:29:34,920
Speaker 1: the Josiah Wedgewood pottery business. Out of all this context

517
00:29:34,920 --> 00:29:40,040
Speaker 1: and family history came Josiah Wedgewood's fourth son, Thomas Wedgewood,

518
00:29:40,080 --> 00:29:42,680
Speaker 1: known as Tom, the youngest in the family, who was

519
00:29:42,800 --> 00:29:46,600
Speaker 1: born in seventeen seventy one, and according to descriptions at

520
00:29:46,600 --> 00:29:49,440
Speaker 1: the time, Tom Wedgewood was he was allegedly a child

521
00:29:49,560 --> 00:29:52,040
Speaker 1: very much in the spirit of the best aspects of

522
00:29:52,080 --> 00:29:58,040
Speaker 1: the Lunatics. He combined thoughtfulness, scientific thinking, uh, conscience, you know,

523
00:29:58,160 --> 00:30:00,959
Speaker 1: industrious nous. If you read the accounts of him from

524
00:30:00,960 --> 00:30:03,120
Speaker 1: people who knew him, it seems like people were gaga

525
00:30:03,320 --> 00:30:06,920
Speaker 1: for Tom Wedgewood, like Watson and Rappaport. Quote one friend

526
00:30:06,920 --> 00:30:09,560
Speaker 1: of his who said Tom was quote a strange and

527
00:30:09,640 --> 00:30:13,840
Speaker 1: wonderful being, full of goodness, benevolence, with a mind stored

528
00:30:13,880 --> 00:30:18,400
Speaker 1: with ideas, a man of wonderful talents, attactive taste, acute

529
00:30:18,440 --> 00:30:22,440
Speaker 1: beyond description, with even good nature and mild manners, and

530
00:30:22,480 --> 00:30:25,880
Speaker 1: the English poet William Wordsworth, with whom, of course uh

531
00:30:25,880 --> 00:30:28,960
Speaker 1: Thomas was friends, wrote of him like this quote, his

532
00:30:29,080 --> 00:30:32,400
Speaker 1: calm and dignified manner, united with his tall person and

533
00:30:32,440 --> 00:30:36,400
Speaker 1: beautiful face, produced in me an impression of sublimity beyond

534
00:30:36,560 --> 00:30:39,880
Speaker 1: what I had ever experienced from the impearance from the

535
00:30:39,880 --> 00:30:44,960
Speaker 1: appearance of any other human being. Like, whoa, what what

536
00:30:45,120 --> 00:30:47,120
Speaker 1: is it with this guy? Well, it sounds like he's

537
00:30:47,200 --> 00:30:50,239
Speaker 1: he's tall and handsome, so that maybe helps a little bit.

538
00:30:50,320 --> 00:30:52,720
Speaker 1: I guess words worth just crushing on him really hard.

539
00:30:53,080 --> 00:30:56,040
Speaker 1: But at the same time, unfortunately, Tom faced a lot

540
00:30:56,080 --> 00:30:58,840
Speaker 1: of health problems. He had had poor health since childhood.

541
00:30:59,320 --> 00:31:01,240
Speaker 1: Uh and it it's written that if he'd been in

542
00:31:01,360 --> 00:31:04,160
Speaker 1: better health, he might actually have been more likely to

543
00:31:04,280 --> 00:31:07,360
Speaker 1: really enter the family pottery business in earnest like there

544
00:31:07,360 --> 00:31:11,160
Speaker 1: are indications that his father, Josiah intended him to be

545
00:31:11,200 --> 00:31:13,480
Speaker 1: in the family business. He wrote that he intended him

546
00:31:13,480 --> 00:31:17,240
Speaker 1: to be quote the traveler and negotiator for the firm,

547
00:31:17,280 --> 00:31:19,640
Speaker 1: so he could have been all over the place negotiating big,

548
00:31:19,680 --> 00:31:23,320
Speaker 1: big pottery deals. Um. But instead it seems that some

549
00:31:23,400 --> 00:31:26,480
Speaker 1: combination of his illnesses, his his poor health and his

550
00:31:26,600 --> 00:31:29,400
Speaker 1: sort of lack of interest in pottery kept him out

551
00:31:29,440 --> 00:31:32,560
Speaker 1: of the business, and instead he focused on private interests,

552
00:31:32,600 --> 00:31:36,480
Speaker 1: including art and science. He was apparently good at drawing,

553
00:31:36,800 --> 00:31:41,480
Speaker 1: and he really loved chemistry, so he pursued experiments, sometimes

554
00:31:41,480 --> 00:31:44,160
Speaker 1: to the point of exhaustion, with different chemicals, and he

555
00:31:44,200 --> 00:31:48,200
Speaker 1: was encouraged in his scientific pursuits by figures like Erasmus

556
00:31:48,280 --> 00:31:51,560
Speaker 1: Darwin and Joseph Priestley, the latter of whom encouraged him

557
00:31:51,600 --> 00:31:55,520
Speaker 1: specifically to study the mysterious properties of light and heat,

558
00:31:55,920 --> 00:32:00,400
Speaker 1: and so light especially grabbed Tom's imagination. He became really

559
00:32:00,400 --> 00:32:03,760
Speaker 1: immersed in the study of light and optics and photochemistry.

560
00:32:04,120 --> 00:32:06,760
Speaker 1: He had studied Isaac Newton. He knew a good bit

561
00:32:06,800 --> 00:32:09,080
Speaker 1: about the properties of light, but at that point still

562
00:32:09,480 --> 00:32:11,920
Speaker 1: no one had come up with a method for making

563
00:32:11,960 --> 00:32:16,320
Speaker 1: the image projected in a camera obscura stay put after

564
00:32:16,400 --> 00:32:19,680
Speaker 1: the light source changed or disappeared. And so what Tom

565
00:32:19,680 --> 00:32:22,040
Speaker 1: Wedgewood wanted to do was to take the principles of

566
00:32:22,080 --> 00:32:25,560
Speaker 1: the camera obscura and combine them with chemistry to fix

567
00:32:25,680 --> 00:32:27,760
Speaker 1: the image, in other words, to figure out how to

568
00:32:27,840 --> 00:32:32,280
Speaker 1: create the first photograph, and eventually, around sometime around the

569
00:32:32,320 --> 00:32:34,800
Speaker 1: turn of the eighteen hundreds. We don't know exactly what

570
00:32:34,880 --> 00:32:38,800
Speaker 1: year this was. Wedgewood had discovered a method to produce

571
00:32:38,920 --> 00:32:43,200
Speaker 1: what came to be called photograms or shadow grams or

572
00:32:43,400 --> 00:32:46,840
Speaker 1: silver pictures that kind of like shadow grams. Sounds good,

573
00:32:46,840 --> 00:32:50,320
Speaker 1: sounds like something than elves would do at family reunions.

574
00:32:50,400 --> 00:32:52,800
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, uh so, I want to quote a section

575
00:32:52,920 --> 00:32:57,320
Speaker 1: describing this process from Watson and Rappaport's book. They write

576
00:32:57,320 --> 00:33:00,880
Speaker 1: about the shadow grams. Quote. He achieved them by applying

577
00:33:00,880 --> 00:33:04,560
Speaker 1: a mixture of silver nitrate dissolved in water to pieces

578
00:33:04,560 --> 00:33:07,600
Speaker 1: of paper and then exposing the paper to the light

579
00:33:07,720 --> 00:33:11,920
Speaker 1: with small flat objects such as leaves or insects wings

580
00:33:12,400 --> 00:33:15,840
Speaker 1: laid on their surface. He also tried using pieces of

581
00:33:15,880 --> 00:33:19,840
Speaker 1: white chamois leather as the medium, which proved more successful.

582
00:33:20,200 --> 00:33:24,080
Speaker 1: The leather readily soaked up the silver nitrate solution, and

583
00:33:24,120 --> 00:33:27,280
Speaker 1: it is possible that the ingredients used in tannings, such

584
00:33:27,320 --> 00:33:30,640
Speaker 1: as galls and salts, that were already present in it,

585
00:33:30,840 --> 00:33:34,160
Speaker 1: reacted with the silver nitrate, giving a faster and more

586
00:33:34,240 --> 00:33:38,760
Speaker 1: successful response. So he he's making an improvement on the

587
00:33:39,000 --> 00:33:42,960
Speaker 1: the Scholtz silver nitrate bottle. Right, He's getting a flat

588
00:33:43,000 --> 00:33:46,360
Speaker 1: surface soaking it with silver nitrate, and this reacts to

589
00:33:46,400 --> 00:33:51,000
Speaker 1: the light, creating the silhouette images. And it really did work,

590
00:33:51,240 --> 00:33:55,000
Speaker 1: but it had severe limitations, the most important limitation among

591
00:33:55,040 --> 00:33:58,600
Speaker 1: them being that the shadow grams were delicate creatures of

592
00:33:58,680 --> 00:34:02,600
Speaker 1: the darkness. You couldn't expose them to any bright lights

593
00:34:02,880 --> 00:34:05,920
Speaker 1: or they would turn dark all over. So you could

594
00:34:05,920 --> 00:34:08,440
Speaker 1: go to all this trouble of creating a fixed shadow

595
00:34:08,480 --> 00:34:11,040
Speaker 1: gram inside a darkened box, but as soon as you

596
00:34:11,080 --> 00:34:13,719
Speaker 1: take it out into the sunlight to look at what

597
00:34:13,760 --> 00:34:17,440
Speaker 1: you've accomplished, it turns dark and becomes ruined. And so

598
00:34:17,560 --> 00:34:20,560
Speaker 1: Wedgewood literally had to show his shadow grams to his

599
00:34:20,640 --> 00:34:22,960
Speaker 1: friends and two people who you know, he wanted to

600
00:34:23,320 --> 00:34:25,200
Speaker 1: understand what he was doing. He had to show them

601
00:34:25,600 --> 00:34:28,600
Speaker 1: these things at night by faint candle light, or else

602
00:34:28,640 --> 00:34:32,839
Speaker 1: they would be annihilated. So we have a photochemical process here.

603
00:34:33,080 --> 00:34:36,320
Speaker 1: We have a photographic process, but it is not resulting

604
00:34:36,320 --> 00:34:39,480
Speaker 1: in something that we can really call a photograph. It

605
00:34:39,560 --> 00:34:45,239
Speaker 1: is an e femeral product that the results. That's the key.

606
00:34:45,280 --> 00:34:47,680
Speaker 1: It's a femorality. I mean. Other than that, you could

607
00:34:47,719 --> 00:34:51,000
Speaker 1: say that these are the first real photographs, except that

608
00:34:51,080 --> 00:34:53,480
Speaker 1: they didn't stay. You know, they were they were so

609
00:34:53,600 --> 00:34:56,839
Speaker 1: delicate and when exposed to light they would wither. And

610
00:34:56,920 --> 00:34:59,960
Speaker 1: so a few years later Wedgewood collaborated with his friend

611
00:35:00,239 --> 00:35:04,239
Speaker 1: Humphrey Davy, who you know, I always think that's a

612
00:35:04,239 --> 00:35:06,279
Speaker 1: member of the monkeys, but I have to repress not

613
00:35:06,480 --> 00:35:09,239
Speaker 1: he's actually a chemist. Humphrey Davy was a professor of

614
00:35:09,280 --> 00:35:11,799
Speaker 1: chemistry at the Royal Institution at the time. This would

615
00:35:11,800 --> 00:35:14,680
Speaker 1: have been, you know, around around the year eighteen hundred

616
00:35:15,360 --> 00:35:20,040
Speaker 1: and together they reproduced Wedgewood's Shadow Graham experiments in the laboratory.

617
00:35:20,320 --> 00:35:23,279
Speaker 1: And Humphrey Davy himself had already been interested in this

618
00:35:23,360 --> 00:35:26,640
Speaker 1: issue of of the powers of light and of recording

619
00:35:26,680 --> 00:35:30,120
Speaker 1: light on a media, I mean invent He had written, quote,

620
00:35:30,280 --> 00:35:33,840
Speaker 1: what we mean by nature is a series of visible images,

621
00:35:34,280 --> 00:35:37,880
Speaker 1: but these are constituted by light. Hints the worshiper of

622
00:35:37,960 --> 00:35:41,480
Speaker 1: nature is a worshiper of light. Again, this same kind

623
00:35:41,520 --> 00:35:43,880
Speaker 1: of sentence, like the primacy of light in all of

624
00:35:44,000 --> 00:35:46,920
Speaker 1: nature and all of the natural sciences, Like Roger Bacon,

625
00:35:47,080 --> 00:35:50,480
Speaker 1: like Erasmus Darwin, and again together they were able to

626
00:35:50,600 --> 00:35:53,480
Speaker 1: fix an image, but they couldn't keep it fixed. They

627
00:35:53,480 --> 00:35:56,759
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out how to protect the image from subsequent

628
00:35:56,880 --> 00:36:01,000
Speaker 1: exposure to light, and unfortunately Tom Wedge had never published

629
00:36:01,000 --> 00:36:03,520
Speaker 1: his findings because he was in bad shape by the

630
00:36:03,520 --> 00:36:06,600
Speaker 1: early eighteen hundreds. At some point in the seventeen nineties,

631
00:36:06,920 --> 00:36:09,640
Speaker 1: one of the dangers of being friends with Erasmus Darwin

632
00:36:09,760 --> 00:36:12,439
Speaker 1: is that he will apparently prescribe you opium for your

633
00:36:12,440 --> 00:36:17,400
Speaker 1: health ills. And Erasmus Darwin had prescribed him opium. Unfortunately,

634
00:36:17,440 --> 00:36:20,160
Speaker 1: this of course turned into an opium addiction that would

635
00:36:20,200 --> 00:36:22,600
Speaker 1: go on to plague him for years. And uh, this

636
00:36:22,680 --> 00:36:24,840
Speaker 1: seemed to be a common problem in these circles. Like

637
00:36:24,840 --> 00:36:27,359
Speaker 1: Wedgewood was friends with the romantic poet we already mentioned,

638
00:36:27,400 --> 00:36:30,080
Speaker 1: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had you know, said that one

639
00:36:30,120 --> 00:36:34,880
Speaker 1: of Darwin's poems nauseated him. But also you know Coleridge

640
00:36:34,920 --> 00:36:37,520
Speaker 1: had severe opium issues. Oh yes, he wrote a Confessions

641
00:36:37,520 --> 00:36:40,680
Speaker 1: of an English Opium Meter, which of course gets into

642
00:36:40,680 --> 00:36:43,200
Speaker 1: some of this, and you know, describes these visions of

643
00:36:43,360 --> 00:36:48,000
Speaker 1: crocodilians that would that eat experience. Yeah wait, what am

644
00:36:48,000 --> 00:36:50,120
Speaker 1: I saying? It wasn't Cooler Ridge. It was Thomas de

645
00:36:50,200 --> 00:36:52,640
Speaker 1: Quincy that wrote Confessions of an English Opium Meter. Sorry

646
00:36:52,680 --> 00:36:55,200
Speaker 1: about that, No need to be sorry. It's all opium

647
00:36:55,239 --> 00:36:59,200
Speaker 1: under the bridge. And so, unfortunately Wedgewood died in eighteen

648
00:36:59,200 --> 00:37:02,040
Speaker 1: oh five without publicizing his work on the shadow grams.

649
00:37:02,120 --> 00:37:07,000
Speaker 1: But fortunately Humphrey Davy, his collaborator and friend, published them instead.

650
00:37:07,120 --> 00:37:09,279
Speaker 1: And so in eighteen o two, a few years before

651
00:37:09,280 --> 00:37:12,360
Speaker 1: Wedgwood died, Davy published quote an account of a method

652
00:37:12,360 --> 00:37:15,839
Speaker 1: of copying paintings upon glass and of making profiles by

653
00:37:15,880 --> 00:37:19,080
Speaker 1: the agency of light upon nitrate of silver, And this

654
00:37:19,160 --> 00:37:21,520
Speaker 1: was in the Journal of the Royal Institution in eighteen

655
00:37:21,560 --> 00:37:24,360
Speaker 1: o two. Uh and Davy did give Tom Wedgewood credit

656
00:37:24,440 --> 00:37:26,640
Speaker 1: for the discovery, so he didn't like steal that. He

657
00:37:26,680 --> 00:37:28,959
Speaker 1: didn't steal his credit, but he did do the work.

658
00:37:29,000 --> 00:37:33,279
Speaker 1: I guess that was a gentleman. But here we we

659
00:37:33,320 --> 00:37:36,400
Speaker 1: come across just like a further subdivision of this problem.

660
00:37:36,440 --> 00:37:38,799
Speaker 1: Like before we said that in order for something to

661
00:37:38,840 --> 00:37:41,960
Speaker 1: really constitute photography, you had to be able to focus

662
00:37:41,960 --> 00:37:44,560
Speaker 1: an image on a two D surface and somehow fix

663
00:37:44,680 --> 00:37:48,120
Speaker 1: the image there. And here Wedgwood and Davy had a

664
00:37:48,239 --> 00:37:50,720
Speaker 1: sort of method for fixing the image, but the problem

665
00:37:50,719 --> 00:37:54,000
Speaker 1: was they couldn't stop the image from from continuing to

666
00:37:54,080 --> 00:37:57,520
Speaker 1: fix when they wanted it to. Subsequent exposure to light

667
00:37:57,560 --> 00:38:01,240
Speaker 1: would just keep exposing the shadow gram until it contained

668
00:38:01,239 --> 00:38:04,480
Speaker 1: no information anymore. So the second half of the problem

669
00:38:04,480 --> 00:38:07,319
Speaker 1: of photography I think now has to be divided into

670
00:38:07,719 --> 00:38:11,279
Speaker 1: fixing the image really means exposing the original image and

671
00:38:11,360 --> 00:38:15,640
Speaker 1: fixing it in place, but then preventing additional exposure to

672
00:38:15,719 --> 00:38:19,160
Speaker 1: light from corrupting the first image. So so from here

673
00:38:19,239 --> 00:38:22,480
Speaker 1: this really becomes the problem. And Davy unfortunately did not

674
00:38:22,560 --> 00:38:25,920
Speaker 1: pursue this research much further. Uh, he never discovered the

675
00:38:25,920 --> 00:38:29,800
Speaker 1: solution to the problem, though he did predict that whenever

676
00:38:29,840 --> 00:38:32,360
Speaker 1: someone was able to solve this problem to stop the

677
00:38:32,400 --> 00:38:35,960
Speaker 1: image from continuing to expose and darken all over, it

678
00:38:36,000 --> 00:38:40,480
Speaker 1: would quote render the process as useful as it is elegant. Now,

679
00:38:40,520 --> 00:38:42,680
Speaker 1: in the next episode, we're going to explore the two

680
00:38:42,719 --> 00:38:46,360
Speaker 1: figures who are most often credited with actually inventing true

681
00:38:46,400 --> 00:38:49,600
Speaker 1: photography in the eighteen thirties, usually in eighteen thirty nine.

682
00:38:50,120 --> 00:38:52,399
Speaker 1: And these figures we mentioned their names earlier, of course,

683
00:38:52,440 --> 00:38:55,520
Speaker 1: being Louis de Gare and Henry Fox Talbot. But before

684
00:38:55,560 --> 00:38:57,319
Speaker 1: we get to them, I think we should mention at

685
00:38:57,400 --> 00:39:01,799
Speaker 1: least one more important precursor to the photographic revolution, and

686
00:39:01,880 --> 00:39:06,719
Speaker 1: that is the work of Joseph Nissa for Nips. All right,

687
00:39:06,760 --> 00:39:08,680
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back,

688
00:39:09,160 --> 00:39:18,960
Speaker 1: we'll start talking about nails. All right, we're back now.

689
00:39:19,080 --> 00:39:21,560
Speaker 1: Before we started recording this episode, I think Robert and

690
00:39:21,600 --> 00:39:24,560
Speaker 1: I said the word nips about a hundred times. I

691
00:39:24,600 --> 00:39:27,040
Speaker 1: know it's not his fault, but I cannot think about

692
00:39:27,120 --> 00:39:29,279
Speaker 1: him without thinking about the Are they they called the

693
00:39:29,280 --> 00:39:32,600
Speaker 1: the yip yips on Sesame Street. Yeah, I thought about

694
00:39:32,640 --> 00:39:35,759
Speaker 1: them as well, the alien creatures. And then I also

695
00:39:35,760 --> 00:39:38,640
Speaker 1: thought about the Knights who say nip the monty python,

696
00:39:38,760 --> 00:39:40,399
Speaker 1: because you know that I guess would be the Knights

697
00:39:40,440 --> 00:39:44,920
Speaker 1: who saying yeps. But yes, Joseph Nips lives seventeen sixty

698
00:39:44,960 --> 00:39:48,279
Speaker 1: five through eighteen thirty three. He was a French inventor,

699
00:39:48,280 --> 00:39:51,960
Speaker 1: retired army officer and uh He's sometimes credited as the

700
00:39:52,000 --> 00:39:55,320
Speaker 1: inventor of photography, but is it at the very least

701
00:39:55,360 --> 00:39:58,600
Speaker 1: a key figure in the invention of photography because his

702
00:39:58,719 --> 00:40:02,560
Speaker 1: discoveries were later improved on by Tagara and Talbot. But

703
00:40:02,640 --> 00:40:05,960
Speaker 1: what Nips actually did here was he discovered a way

704
00:40:06,160 --> 00:40:09,840
Speaker 1: to fix images on a pewter plate covered in bitumen

705
00:40:10,480 --> 00:40:14,080
Speaker 1: bitumen of Judea to be specific. Bitumen, of course, is

706
00:40:14,080 --> 00:40:16,000
Speaker 1: a substance we've discussed and stuff to blow your mind

707
00:40:16,320 --> 00:40:18,799
Speaker 1: in the past, in part because it's where we get

708
00:40:18,800 --> 00:40:22,080
Speaker 1: the word mummy. We also mentioned it in the Invention

709
00:40:22,080 --> 00:40:25,440
Speaker 1: episode on Roads because it is basically an asphalt of

710
00:40:25,520 --> 00:40:28,920
Speaker 1: Asia minor, used in you know, in ancient times as

711
00:40:28,960 --> 00:40:32,040
Speaker 1: a cement and a mortar, but also used for various

712
00:40:32,040 --> 00:40:36,239
Speaker 1: other uses cosmetics, et cetera. Okay, so how does this

713
00:40:36,280 --> 00:40:40,600
Speaker 1: process work? Okay, so the process was heliography, which I

714
00:40:40,600 --> 00:40:43,279
Speaker 1: think is a nice term. Yes, all right, it makes

715
00:40:43,280 --> 00:40:45,719
Speaker 1: me think of earlier we mentioned how Degarat wrote, you know,

716
00:40:45,760 --> 00:40:49,440
Speaker 1: the sun will make my drawings for me. Yeah, exactly. Um.

717
00:40:49,760 --> 00:40:51,680
Speaker 1: But to understand how it works, you have to first

718
00:40:51,760 --> 00:40:55,640
Speaker 1: understand how bitumen was used in making etchings on copper

719
00:40:55,719 --> 00:40:59,640
Speaker 1: plates at the time. So you code a copper plate

720
00:40:59,719 --> 00:41:02,600
Speaker 1: and taman and then you etch something on it by

721
00:41:02,680 --> 00:41:07,680
Speaker 1: scratching away the bitumen and exposing the copper. So you

722
00:41:07,800 --> 00:41:12,000
Speaker 1: got this copper plate, it's coated in this asphalt stuff. Uh,

723
00:41:12,000 --> 00:41:15,319
Speaker 1: and then you scratch away you say, you scratch a

724
00:41:15,360 --> 00:41:17,480
Speaker 1: donkey into it or something. Okay, So it's kind of

725
00:41:17,520 --> 00:41:21,120
Speaker 1: like like an engraving. Right, Well, that's exactly what it's

726
00:41:21,120 --> 00:41:25,279
Speaker 1: going to be used for. Um, because after this you

727
00:41:25,320 --> 00:41:28,680
Speaker 1: could bathe it an acid and that darkens the exposed areas.

728
00:41:28,719 --> 00:41:31,120
Speaker 1: Everywhere you scratched away some of the bitumen, it is

729
00:41:31,120 --> 00:41:34,440
Speaker 1: going to darken the copper. And then you dissolve the

730
00:41:34,440 --> 00:41:37,160
Speaker 1: bitumin itself in solvent and you could then use the

731
00:41:37,200 --> 00:41:42,760
Speaker 1: plate to press the etching into parchment. Now, Nipps noticed

732
00:41:42,880 --> 00:41:47,359
Speaker 1: that light made the bitumen less soluble, So lay an

733
00:41:47,360 --> 00:41:51,840
Speaker 1: engraving printed sheet of paper over all of this, expose

734
00:41:51,880 --> 00:41:54,440
Speaker 1: it to light, and then you could use a solvent

735
00:41:54,520 --> 00:41:57,920
Speaker 1: to remove all but the light hardened portions of the bitumen.

736
00:41:58,760 --> 00:42:02,200
Speaker 1: So in he used this very technique to make an

737
00:42:02,200 --> 00:42:05,760
Speaker 1: exact copy of an etching of Pope Pious the seventh,

738
00:42:06,480 --> 00:42:10,000
Speaker 1: but then it was later destroyed in one of his experiments. Yeah,

739
00:42:10,080 --> 00:42:13,320
Speaker 1: but but it was, you know, a copy. Uh. In

740
00:42:14,840 --> 00:42:16,719
Speaker 1: he made a copy of an etching of a man

741
00:42:16,840 --> 00:42:19,520
Speaker 1: on a horse, and this one, this etching. Uh this

742
00:42:19,600 --> 00:42:23,520
Speaker 1: copy survives to this day the earliest example of a

743
00:42:23,640 --> 00:42:27,000
Speaker 1: photographically created image. And he also did one of a

744
00:42:27,040 --> 00:42:29,800
Speaker 1: woman at a spinning wheel. Uh. These are in effect

745
00:42:29,960 --> 00:42:33,360
Speaker 1: the oldest photo copies in the world. It would be

746
00:42:33,360 --> 00:42:36,400
Speaker 1: wrong to call him a true photograph. They are uh,

747
00:42:36,520 --> 00:42:41,680
Speaker 1: you know, products of photographic technology, but they are essentially photocopies.

748
00:42:41,800 --> 00:42:43,759
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it right now. So we've got a

749
00:42:43,880 --> 00:42:47,000
Speaker 1: young man i think, in a tricorn hat leading a

750
00:42:47,000 --> 00:42:50,399
Speaker 1: horse by the bit. The horse looks very uh, kind

751
00:42:50,400 --> 00:42:53,319
Speaker 1: of riled up and and muscly, and the guy looks

752
00:42:53,440 --> 00:42:56,040
Speaker 1: very disturbed. Yeah, so he made a copy of an

753
00:42:56,040 --> 00:43:00,680
Speaker 1: etching here. Again not photography yet, but getting close and closer.

754
00:43:01,320 --> 00:43:03,920
Speaker 1: The thing is, if you combine this technique with the

755
00:43:03,960 --> 00:43:07,880
Speaker 1: camera obscura, which which Nips also had experimented with earlier

756
00:43:07,880 --> 00:43:11,960
Speaker 1: on uh, then you have a true photograph. Uh. So

757
00:43:12,040 --> 00:43:14,720
Speaker 1: the the image is cast upon the bitumen coated plate

758
00:43:15,040 --> 00:43:18,239
Speaker 1: and in eight or eighteen twenty seven he used this

759
00:43:18,320 --> 00:43:20,960
Speaker 1: method to take a photo of a view from a

760
00:43:21,000 --> 00:43:24,640
Speaker 1: window in his house, and the results is the oldest

761
00:43:24,719 --> 00:43:30,440
Speaker 1: known camera photograph in existence. It's I'll try to include

762
00:43:30,560 --> 00:43:33,759
Speaker 1: this image on the landing page for this episode at

763
00:43:33,800 --> 00:43:37,200
Speaker 1: invention pod dot com. Uh it is, it is rough,

764
00:43:37,320 --> 00:43:38,960
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to tell what you're looking at,

765
00:43:40,120 --> 00:43:45,279
Speaker 1: but it is a photograph created via this technique. It

766
00:43:45,320 --> 00:43:48,439
Speaker 1: has an amazing ghostly quality, though it does it looks

767
00:43:48,480 --> 00:43:50,959
Speaker 1: like something from the ring video. Yeah, it really does.

768
00:43:51,000 --> 00:43:53,680
Speaker 1: But also just knowing what you're looking at, Uh, there's

769
00:43:53,719 --> 00:43:55,560
Speaker 1: something kind of spooky about it, you know, like you're

770
00:43:55,600 --> 00:43:59,279
Speaker 1: peering into like the the first of its kind of

771
00:43:59,320 --> 00:44:02,359
Speaker 1: a way of looking at the world in history. Yeah.

772
00:44:03,120 --> 00:44:06,640
Speaker 1: So from here in nine he would go into partner

773
00:44:06,800 --> 00:44:10,440
Speaker 1: with Louis de Guerre, who we mentioned already. Uh, and

774
00:44:10,480 --> 00:44:13,200
Speaker 1: they were the partnership who continue until Nips died in

775
00:44:13,320 --> 00:44:16,400
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty three at the age of sixty eight. And

776
00:44:16,440 --> 00:44:18,439
Speaker 1: I guess in the next episode we're going to pick

777
00:44:18,520 --> 00:44:21,480
Speaker 1: up with the stories of Louis de Guerre and Henry

778
00:44:21,480 --> 00:44:26,640
Speaker 1: Fox Talbot, who are generally created credited as actually inventing

779
00:44:26,680 --> 00:44:30,640
Speaker 1: photography as we know it now. That's right, But even

780
00:44:30,719 --> 00:44:32,480
Speaker 1: even then, so so far it's been just I think

781
00:44:32,560 --> 00:44:34,920
Speaker 1: a fascinating journey just to you know, look at what

782
00:44:35,000 --> 00:44:37,799
Speaker 1: the world was sort of like before photography and and

783
00:44:37,880 --> 00:44:41,360
Speaker 1: explore these different technologies that all kind of come together

784
00:44:41,400 --> 00:44:43,560
Speaker 1: because it's not and I guess this is the case

785
00:44:43,640 --> 00:44:46,560
Speaker 1: really with with so many technologies that either we discussed

786
00:44:46,560 --> 00:44:48,720
Speaker 1: in the show or we'll discuss in the future where

787
00:44:48,840 --> 00:44:51,840
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's not just one area of innovation

788
00:44:51,960 --> 00:44:54,920
Speaker 1: and invention, but it's several different areas. So we have

789
00:44:55,280 --> 00:44:58,040
Speaker 1: you know that the camera obscurea we have these these

790
00:44:58,080 --> 00:45:01,520
Speaker 1: etching technologies, we have these uh you know, these these

791
00:45:01,560 --> 00:45:05,320
Speaker 1: new discoveries about various chemical properties, all of them coming together,

792
00:45:05,840 --> 00:45:08,719
Speaker 1: uh at just the right time, analyzed by just the

793
00:45:08,800 --> 00:45:12,560
Speaker 1: right people, and then brought to new life in the

794
00:45:12,640 --> 00:45:16,000
Speaker 1: form of a brand new technology. One thing I want

795
00:45:16,040 --> 00:45:18,600
Speaker 1: to continue to explore in the next episode, I think

796
00:45:18,760 --> 00:45:24,279
Speaker 1: is the is the relationship between technology and art, and

797
00:45:24,320 --> 00:45:26,360
Speaker 1: that's something that I think really comes through, especially in

798
00:45:26,360 --> 00:45:28,240
Speaker 1: the life of Louis de Gerets. So I'm very excited

799
00:45:28,280 --> 00:45:30,920
Speaker 1: to talk about that. That's right, So look for all

800
00:45:30,960 --> 00:45:35,040
Speaker 1: that in the next episode of Invention. In the meantime,

801
00:45:35,080 --> 00:45:37,319
Speaker 1: if you want to catch up on past episodes of

802
00:45:37,480 --> 00:45:41,000
Speaker 1: Invention again, head on over to invention pod dot com.

803
00:45:41,040 --> 00:45:43,400
Speaker 1: That is the website for this show. You'll find all

804
00:45:43,400 --> 00:45:45,480
Speaker 1: the episodes. You'll find a links out to a few

805
00:45:45,480 --> 00:45:49,160
Speaker 1: different social media accounts. If you want to discuss this

806
00:45:49,239 --> 00:45:53,160
Speaker 1: episode with other listeners, you should go on over to Facebook.

807
00:45:53,280 --> 00:45:56,320
Speaker 1: There's a group there Stuff to Blow your Mind Discussion Module.

808
00:45:56,719 --> 00:46:00,320
Speaker 1: It is a place where folks who listen to invene

809
00:46:00,120 --> 00:46:03,440
Speaker 1: in and stuff to blow your mind, hang out, discuss

810
00:46:03,840 --> 00:46:07,680
Speaker 1: topics that we've talked about, discussed topics we should talk about, uh,

811
00:46:07,680 --> 00:46:10,719
Speaker 1: and just share, you know, general generally interesting content with

812
00:46:10,800 --> 00:46:14,040
Speaker 1: each other. A lot of squirrel memes to let's be honest. Yeah, yeah,

813
00:46:14,040 --> 00:46:18,839
Speaker 1: it's all good. Okay huge Thanks as always to our

814
00:46:18,880 --> 00:46:22,000
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer, Tory Harrison. If you would like to

815
00:46:22,000 --> 00:46:24,360
Speaker 1: get in touch with us with feedback on this episode

816
00:46:24,440 --> 00:46:26,560
Speaker 1: or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,

817
00:46:26,640 --> 00:46:28,960
Speaker 1: or just to say hello, you can email us at

818
00:46:29,200 --> 00:46:38,680
Speaker 1: contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of

819
00:46:38,680 --> 00:46:41,600
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio because

820
00:46:41,680 --> 00:46:44,279
Speaker 1: the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

821
00:46:44,320 --> 00:46:45,200
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows,