Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and we're back to discuss more optical recording technology.
Speaker 1: Last time we talked about the camera obscura, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a necessary precursor to true photographic technology. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: from like the writings of Master Mo in ancient China
Speaker 1: to the experiments of Roger Bacon and Leonardo da Vinci,
Speaker 1: the camera obscura has been this fascinating way that people
Speaker 1: discovered to take an image of the ever changing three
Speaker 1: D world outside and project it onto a two D
Speaker 1: surface inside a box, either just through a pinhole or
Speaker 1: focused with the lens or with a mirror. Yeah, essentially
Speaker 1: externalizing sight to a certain extent, like taking uh, something
Speaker 1: of what it is to see the world and uh
Speaker 1: and car having it away from reality, projecting it on
Speaker 1: the wall and uh and allowing us to see it
Speaker 1: there instead. Yeah. Well, it's it's making site a new
Speaker 1: kind of thing. I mean, otherwise, site is seeing the
Speaker 1: three D world and putting an image of the world
Speaker 1: on a wall that does sort of suggest to you
Speaker 1: a new way that things could be like the idea,
Speaker 1: like a real image of the real world being just
Speaker 1: like a painting, something that you could, you know, move
Speaker 1: around and make copies of. And so the camera obscura
Speaker 1: did not constitute photography. It's sort of half of the story, right,
Speaker 1: because photography has to do two things. Number one, it
Speaker 1: has to focus an image of the world on a
Speaker 1: two D surface. But number two, it has to make
Speaker 1: that image permanent, to fix the image so that it
Speaker 1: stays after the source of the light has gone away, right,
Speaker 1: like in a flint Stone's world. I suppose you could
Speaker 1: have a camera that consists of a camera obscura, and
Speaker 1: then there's a small of terra sa something inside the
Speaker 1: camera box that then traces everything, and then that would
Speaker 1: be your photograph. But it's how we get that terrasaar
Speaker 1: tracing the upside down vision of a of a park
Speaker 1: h That is where we get into the like the
Speaker 1: true technology, the true invention of modern photography, exactly right.
Speaker 1: So we we've got the camera obscure, we've got the
Speaker 1: technology to focus an image on a two D surface
Speaker 1: using a pinhole or a lens. But the question is
Speaker 1: how to make it permanent, how to fix the image.
Speaker 1: The camera obscured does the first half, but how do
Speaker 1: we get to the second? And I wanted to go
Speaker 1: ahead and mention a book that I'm going to be
Speaker 1: referring to, probably over the next several episodes that we
Speaker 1: do on the history of photography. This is a book
Speaker 1: I've been reading and really enjoying called Capturing the Light
Speaker 1: The Birth of Photography, A true Story of Genius and Rivalry,
Speaker 1: by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport. Now, this book focuses
Speaker 1: on the two main people who are actually credited as
Speaker 1: the inventors of photography in the modern sense, and that
Speaker 1: would be Louis de Guerre and Henry Fox Talbot. We're
Speaker 1: not going to quite get to them today because today
Speaker 1: we wanted to focus on photographic technology that came before them,
Speaker 1: what was almost photography but not quite. But actually the
Speaker 1: title of the book comes from a quote that Louis
Speaker 1: de Gare the the inventor of the de guara type,
Speaker 1: who will talk about more in the next episode, something
Speaker 1: he wrote in a letter to Charles Chevalier in eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty nine when he had made this discovery of how
Speaker 1: to really finally trap the image and what he said.
Speaker 1: This is translated from the French. He said, I have
Speaker 1: captured the light and arrested its flight. The sun itself
Speaker 1: shall draw my pictures. Oh wow, that's beautiful. It is beautiful.
Speaker 1: It sounds almost kind of grandiose and diabolical. It makes
Speaker 1: the hair on the back of my next stand up
Speaker 1: a bit. Hey. When we were talking about inventions and
Speaker 1: we have to talk about inventors, and you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: we can get a little carried away, you know, I
Speaker 1: wanted to read a quote from Watson and Rappaport's book
Speaker 1: where they're talking about the the intellectual uh background to
Speaker 1: the era of photography before photography came around, and the
Speaker 1: writing about the influence of Isaac Newton. So they're discussing
Speaker 1: quote Isaac Newton's seminal work on the subject during the
Speaker 1: sixteen seventies, which culminated in the publication in seventeen o
Speaker 1: four of his Optics. In it, Newton unknowingly predicted the
Speaker 1: science of photochemistry when he remarked that quote, the changing
Speaker 1: of bodies into light and light into bodies is very
Speaker 1: conformable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutation.
Speaker 1: And this is great in multiple ways, because he's talking
Speaker 1: about the idea that light could itself make a physical
Speaker 1: change in matter. Right, that that's what happens in a photograph.
Speaker 1: You're changing something in a fixed material object just by
Speaker 1: exposure to light. And that's like the key chemistry behind photography.
Speaker 1: But also when he talks about transmutation, the authors note
Speaker 1: that this is in a way a nod towards alchemy,
Speaker 1: and that Newton was this important bridge between the magicians
Speaker 1: of old and the scientists of the new world. He
Speaker 1: was sort of the last of the medieval magicians and
Speaker 1: alchemists and the first of the modern scientists. Yeah. One
Speaker 1: thing I think we'll probably touch on again and again
Speaker 1: and all of this is that the photochemical nature of
Speaker 1: photography uh and and, combined with lenses and all, it
Speaker 1: does sound seem very magical. But in our age of
Speaker 1: of digital photography and uh and and cell phone pictures,
Speaker 1: it's easy to forget that that. Yeah, you had what
Speaker 1: at heart was a chemical and an optical process. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and why does Why would it be that photography is
Speaker 1: anymore scientifically plausible than these fools errands of the alchemists,
Speaker 1: like changing lead into gold. Right, you know that that
Speaker 1: seems from a from a vantage point where you don't
Speaker 1: know enough about chemistry to say, well, they're they're just
Speaker 1: sort of like equally fanciful chemical imaginings, right, And and
Speaker 1: some of the pre photographic processes that we're going to
Speaker 1: discuss here they do sound like some sort of an
Speaker 1: occult ritual. Oh yeah, I love this stuff. I can't
Speaker 1: wait to get to it. So, uh, picking up on
Speaker 1: what we talked about with the last time with the
Speaker 1: camera obscure. Of course, the camera obscura was known very
Speaker 1: well to the scientific thinkers of like the Enlightenment era,
Speaker 1: and in the eighteenth century there was a steady increase
Speaker 1: in interest in whether the kinds of images projected in
Speaker 1: a camera obscura could somehow be fixed or made permanent.
Speaker 1: This is something that came to mind for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, but they couldn't figure out how to do
Speaker 1: it right, because, as I mentioned earlier, you could have
Speaker 1: a flint stone situation where some sort of small dinosaur
Speaker 1: terrasaar then traces everything and creates an image. And we
Speaker 1: did discuss in the in the Camerascura episode how some
Speaker 1: individuals allegedly and in other cases certainly did use the
Speaker 1: camera obscura to trace images and ultimately create works of
Speaker 1: more traditional art. Yeah, da Vinci, I think, but possibly Vermeer, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the theory anyway. But to have an actual chemical
Speaker 1: process that makes this possible without the need of of
Speaker 1: a mer or a cartoon dinosaur, that is the That's
Speaker 1: the key area of development that we're gonna be discussing today,
Speaker 1: to make a light capturing machine, something that automatically captures
Speaker 1: an image of the natural world. Absolutely. Now, in all
Speaker 1: of our episodes of invention, we we do try to
Speaker 1: begin with a discussion of what came before, and we
Speaker 1: we have a whole episode on the camera Obscureau which
Speaker 1: gets into a lot of this. But I do want
Speaker 1: to drive home just a few additional highlights to emphasize
Speaker 1: just the importance of photography and why photography is ultimately
Speaker 1: one of the most important technological, artistic, and cultural advancements
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century. So for starters in the pre
Speaker 1: photographic world, unless you could afford a painter or craft
Speaker 1: such art yourself, you could only rely on fragile memories
Speaker 1: of friends and loved ones, uh in in order to
Speaker 1: remember what they like. Both how living individuals looked in
Speaker 1: the past when they were young, and how the departed
Speaker 1: looked when they were still alive. So, you know, think
Speaker 1: think about this. How fixed are your memories of your
Speaker 1: loved ones appearances? Like, really think about it. Is it
Speaker 1: a you know? Is it a is it a definite
Speaker 1: solid thing? Or you perhaps remembering things just say a
Speaker 1: little to the left of reality, you know, or are
Speaker 1: you simply In many cases, I find myself doing this.
Speaker 1: Am I remembering photographs of people or rather than really remembering, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, an intense study of their facial features. I
Speaker 1: have a potentially sort of crazy idea about this, just
Speaker 1: something to wonder about. I wonder if it's possible that
Speaker 1: actually lots of exposure to photographs of one's younger self
Speaker 1: could potentially psychologically delay the process of maturing. Like that
Speaker 1: you could potentially have a longer experience of feeling like
Speaker 1: I am a child, I am a young person because
Speaker 1: you are constantly seeing images of what you looked like
Speaker 1: when you were younger. Interesting, Yeah, I'm not sure about that,
Speaker 1: but I think that's something to consider. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is the thing that's often been commented on that, you know,
Speaker 1: like in in wealthy societies, with modern technology, there seems
Speaker 1: to be a sort of like growing of the age
Speaker 1: of adolescence. People feel like they are young for more
Speaker 1: of their lives and like they become an adult later. Right,
Speaker 1: And you know, I wonder if something playing a role
Speaker 1: in this is just constant exposure to very reliable media
Speaker 1: reflecting what you were like and what you were doing
Speaker 1: when you were young. Well, and as as the father
Speaker 1: of a six almost seven year old, I can tell
Speaker 1: you that they do love to look at photographs of
Speaker 1: themselves and of course hear stories about themselves. And and
Speaker 1: I look back on, you know, my own childhood. I
Speaker 1: remember being exposed to photo out physical photo albums a lot,
Speaker 1: and uh and you know, we had photos hanging on
Speaker 1: the walls and so forth. You know, you you grow
Speaker 1: up in a photographic world. Yeah. Well, anyway, I'm not
Speaker 1: convinced to that. It's just some possibility to think about. Yeah, basically,
Speaker 1: I think it is important not to underestimate the power
Speaker 1: of photography on just the way we think about ourselves,
Speaker 1: our lives, and our loved ones. Absolutely not. I mean,
Speaker 1: it completely changed the world. You can't overstate it. Now.
Speaker 1: Another example would be the cataloging of fauna and flora
Speaker 1: of the natural world. Before photographs, one only had descriptions
Speaker 1: and drawings to go on. Can you imagine that? Like,
Speaker 1: how if you wanted to be a naturalist, you know,
Speaker 1: Charles Starwin type or something. Before photography, it was a
Speaker 1: really important skill to be good at drawing, right, and
Speaker 1: or to have access to someone who's good at it.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not good at drawing. I couldn't have
Speaker 1: done it. Yeah, and and so yeah, when you introduce
Speaker 1: writing or art into the scenario, you know, both are
Speaker 1: highly subject to user error. Um and uh. You know,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that we do have plenty of impressive
Speaker 1: examples of of arts and descriptions from you know, from
Speaker 1: natural list, you know, throughout history, but still we also
Speaker 1: have some pretty bad examples to you know, where it's
Speaker 1: like a game of telephone to describe what a line
Speaker 1: looks like, it's etcetera. Yeah, we'll think about all those
Speaker 1: drawings from the Middle Ages, like drawing of a drawing
Speaker 1: of a rhinoceros, you know, yours rhinoceros. Yeah, we get
Speaker 1: into this in an episode of Stuff to Plow your mind.
Speaker 1: But it looks like what would happen if the idea
Speaker 1: of our rhinoceros made it with a suit of armor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's got a kind of like a
Speaker 1: tool album cover kind of d m T thing going on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a wonderful image, but it's not quite
Speaker 1: a rhino. Likewise, this would have placed you know, similar
Speaker 1: constraints on anything regarding geographic data, military intelligence, and even
Speaker 1: you know, pre photographic journalistic enterprises. You know, any attempt
Speaker 1: to relay what was going on in another area, another
Speaker 1: part of the world, anything that you couldn't see with
Speaker 1: your eyes. Essentially, everything you understood about the world beyond
Speaker 1: your bubble of experience was limited by the power of
Speaker 1: written word and individuals artistic ability and the objectivity and
Speaker 1: accuracy of the writer or artist or storyteller. Uh, and
Speaker 1: the visual processing power of your own mind. And then
Speaker 1: turn what they have given you into some uh you know,
Speaker 1: vision of reality. And I think and I think that's
Speaker 1: that's that's really really key. You know, it's easy to
Speaker 1: take for granted today that I can take something like Egypt.
Speaker 1: I've never been to Egypt, so I've never seen, you know,
Speaker 1: the wonders of the pyramid. I've never seen what life
Speaker 1: consists of. You know, there's wonderful. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: things about traveling is just seeing what life seems to
Speaker 1: consist of for for everyday residents of a particular area.
Speaker 1: I have not seen any of those things in person,
Speaker 1: uh in Egypt, but I have seen photographs, and of
Speaker 1: course I've seen you know, the moving image as well.
Speaker 1: But but just the power of photographs make those things
Speaker 1: real in a way that descriptions and drawings um sometimes
Speaker 1: struggle to recreate absolutely. But then take that, take that
Speaker 1: same principle and and shrink it down in scale and scope,
Speaker 1: So now you're not even talking about stuff all over
Speaker 1: the world, stuff you're removed from in vast amounts of time.
Speaker 1: Think about the way that it's necessary just to show
Speaker 1: you something that you weren't there for yesterday, the way
Speaker 1: it's now used to completely document life. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: for example, think about cell phone cameras now, like that's
Speaker 1: just how ubiquitous has become. Most of us have a
Speaker 1: camera on our bodies at all times that we can
Speaker 1: whip out and record anything. You don't remember what your
Speaker 1: license plate number is, well you just take a quick
Speaker 1: picture of it. And then if that same automobile gets
Speaker 1: in a fender bender, will you take a picture of it? Uh?
Speaker 1: If you were to see Bigfoot or Ufo, well you
Speaker 1: could conceivably take a picture of that as well. And
Speaker 1: that's arguably one of the reasons there are perhaps fewer
Speaker 1: fewer reported sightings of these things in our modern world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because now the question always be well, why didn't you
Speaker 1: take a picture of it? Yeah, you have camera right there.
Speaker 1: You have no excuse, right, I mean, I guess ghosts
Speaker 1: canna get away with it because you can say, well,
Speaker 1: the ghost didn't show up on camera. And yet uh,
Speaker 1: you you look to you know, the early days of photography,
Speaker 1: and you do see a lot of ghosts showing up
Speaker 1: on camera. Because that's one of the other curious natures
Speaker 1: about technology, Right, You introduce a new technology and um
Speaker 1: it it it often makes room for new twists on
Speaker 1: supernatural ideas. Yeah, it's not long before the occultists come knocking. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we might have to come back to that on invention
Speaker 1: for say Halloween episode to discuss how how the invention
Speaker 1: of photography lead to how it influenced uh, supernatural and
Speaker 1: spiritual ideas. Spirit photography totally the ectoplasm. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: even now, photography was again one of the greatest cultural
Speaker 1: and artistic shifts of the nineteenth century. However, as a
Speaker 1: Peter Glossy, Associate curator in the Department of Photography at
Speaker 1: the Museum of Modern Art, UM pointed out in his
Speaker 1: book Before Photography, Painting and the Invention of Photography, photography
Speaker 1: was quote not a bastard left by science on the
Speaker 1: doorstep of art, but a legitimate child of the Western
Speaker 1: pictorial tradition. And I thought, I thought this was this
Speaker 1: was very um, this is very insightful, and I think
Speaker 1: something that's very important to keep in mind. Uh So,
Speaker 1: basically the idea is that photography, yeah, didn't just come
Speaker 1: out of nowhere. It wasn't just completely just dumped like this,
Speaker 1: uh dumped on the doorstep here. Uh No, it came
Speaker 1: on the heels of Renaissance strides in the invention of
Speaker 1: linear perspective and the championing of vision, as as as
Speaker 1: the basis of artistic representation. Photography came on the heels
Speaker 1: of the many gradually formulated pictorial strategies. And you know
Speaker 1: of this pre photographic shift in artistic tradition. So I
Speaker 1: think that's important to to keep in mind. You don't
Speaker 1: just throw painting away because you have photography now. You
Speaker 1: keep painting, obviously, because painting is is beautiful and in
Speaker 1: its many forms. But more to the point, you use
Speaker 1: the lessons of this long developed artistic tradition to inform
Speaker 1: how this new technology will be used not just to
Speaker 1: take pictures of the world, but to induce a kind
Speaker 1: of instant, hyper accurate, chemical painting of reality. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and I mean, of course, there are several ways to
Speaker 1: think about what you just said. I mean, one quite
Speaker 1: clearly is that photography emerges from a tradition of art
Speaker 1: appreciation and art creation. I mean, some of the figures
Speaker 1: who were the most important in the early days of
Speaker 1: photography were in the arts. There were people who were
Speaker 1: accomplished as draftsmen, you know, people who were good at
Speaker 1: drawing pictures and recreating perspective and stuff. And the idea
Speaker 1: of photography was seen as an extension of that artistic project.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just science and technology. I think from the
Speaker 1: very beginning it was art absolutely, But maybe now we
Speaker 1: should focus on the science and think a little bit
Speaker 1: about Okay, so we have this problem of people have
Speaker 1: the camera obscure. They've they've learned ways to take an
Speaker 1: image of the outside world and projected onto a two
Speaker 1: D surface. But how do you fix the image? How
Speaker 1: do you get something to stay once you've projected it?
Speaker 1: And and that's the thing we should explore next. What's
Speaker 1: the chemistry behind the photography revolution? Alright, On that note,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break, and when we
Speaker 1: come back, we're going to discuss Johann Heinrich Schultz. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. Tell me about Mr Schultz, Robert Alright, Joan
Speaker 1: Johann Heinrich Schultz born seven died seventeen forty four. He
Speaker 1: was a German polly math, best remembered for his seventeen
Speaker 1: seventeen experiments with silver nitrate, which, by the way, had
Speaker 1: been discovered by Albertus Magnus Uh, you know, noted Um
Speaker 1: uh thinker and tinker and uh an alchemist in that
Speaker 1: they're teenth century. Magnus document documented, for instance, that nitric
Speaker 1: acid could separate gold and silver by dissolving silver. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So silver nitrate is chemically it's a g N O three,
Speaker 1: it's silver. It's basically a silver salt. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: a precursor to various other silver compounds, but Schiltz was
Speaker 1: particularly interested in the way that various substances mixed with
Speaker 1: silver nitrate darkened in sunlight. Albertus Magnus himself had noted
Speaker 1: centuries earlier that silver nitrate could blacken the skin. That
Speaker 1: reminds me of the murder victims in the name of
Speaker 1: the Rose, who have had their fingertips blackened by an
Speaker 1: unknown substance. That becomes part of the mystery. Yes, not
Speaker 1: only blackened fingers, but black and tongue. He did not
Speaker 1: write with his tongue. I presume I love the alchemy
Speaker 1: type origins here. One thing is that silver nitrate was
Speaker 1: also known uh was. Before it was widely known as
Speaker 1: silver nitrate or nitrate of silver, it was known to
Speaker 1: the alchemists as lunar caustic. This, of course because the
Speaker 1: alchemists saw in action between silver and the moon. So
Speaker 1: a G N O three is a corrosive silver salt,
Speaker 1: and it actually has antimicrobial properties with some applications in
Speaker 1: the history of medicine, to say disinfect or to kill
Speaker 1: outer layers of cells on on some body surface. It's
Speaker 1: of course poisonous if ingested, So do not drink silver
Speaker 1: nitrate yeah, highly effective on werewolves eyes as well. Perhaps, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but keep the lunar caustic out of your mouth. But again,
Speaker 1: Schultz was mainly interested in this darkening that occurred in
Speaker 1: exposure to the sunlight. Right, And in his day, the
Speaker 1: main hypothesis was that that heat caused the change. But
Speaker 1: in his experiments he found that silver nitrate dissolved into
Speaker 1: a slurry of chalk and nitric acid darkened when exposed
Speaker 1: to sunlight, but not when exposed to the heat of
Speaker 1: a fire. So uh. In proving this out, he used
Speaker 1: stencils of words, and he put them around, you know,
Speaker 1: over the glass of a bottle of this mixture, and
Speaker 1: then he sat them the the bottle in the sun
Speaker 1: and this caused the surface of the contents to darken.
Speaker 1: We're exposed to the sun, and this, given the stencils,
Speaker 1: would cause the darkening to spell out the letters of
Speaker 1: the stencils. Right, So you could make shapes appear in
Speaker 1: this solution by selective exposure to sunlight. Right. Instead of
Speaker 1: coloring in the stencil with a SHARPI or magic marker,
Speaker 1: he's allowing this chemical process to do it when exposed
Speaker 1: to sunlight. And then you could shake the bottle and
Speaker 1: the dark the darkened area would go away like sketch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you could do it again, or continued exposure would
Speaker 1: erase them as well. At any rate, these were ephemeral.
Speaker 1: He had no means of making the result permanent. Now
Speaker 1: do these sun prints constitute photography? I think most people
Speaker 1: would say no, But apparently some historians, willing to take
Speaker 1: a really broad definition of photography, are willing to credit
Speaker 1: Truls with the invention of photography, at least have in
Speaker 1: the past. Um, you know, I imagine that's also of
Speaker 1: he interests if you definitely want to make sure that um,
Speaker 1: say a German has attributed to you know, you see
Speaker 1: a lot of that at different times in history where
Speaker 1: there is kind of a you know, um, a nationalist
Speaker 1: interest or just a patriotic interest in attributing the inventor
Speaker 1: of a particular technology. The thing is, no matter how
Speaker 1: you shake it, no pun intended. Um, you know, Schultz
Speaker 1: is still a key individual in the invention of photography.
Speaker 1: This is clearly not photography, but but yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is important what he discovered here about how you
Speaker 1: could you know, project images onto silver nitrate solution? Right,
Speaker 1: And you know, I believe we'll get into Thomas Wedgwood
Speaker 1: and a Humphrey Davy later. But but they worked with
Speaker 1: the creation of shadow images after Schultz's death. Uh, and
Speaker 1: these two were impermanent. Okay, well, I think maybe we
Speaker 1: should move on then to talk about Thomas Wedgewood and
Speaker 1: Humphrey Dabut, But first I want to set the stage
Speaker 1: about where these kind of discoveries came from. So in
Speaker 1: the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was a
Speaker 1: very important, very influential supper club for intellectuals that that
Speaker 1: met once a month in Birmingham, England. And these guys
Speaker 1: called themselves the Lunar Society or sometimes the Lunatics spelled
Speaker 1: with a k uh, And this was because they arranged
Speaker 1: their meetings according to the lunar calendar, hosting their dinners
Speaker 1: on nights of the full moon. So this is already
Speaker 1: conjuring some awesome druid connotations, like you expect them to
Speaker 1: bring out the bulls and start hacking at some mistletoe.
Speaker 1: But these were not occultists. They were intellectuals, natural philosophers, liberals,
Speaker 1: and freethinkers, many of whom had a great interest in
Speaker 1: the emerging sciences and reportedly the real reason they arranged
Speaker 1: their meetings to coincide with the full moon is because
Speaker 1: that made it easier to walk home afterwards. In the
Speaker 1: absence of artificial lighting. One presumes them may have indulged
Speaker 1: in a bit of wine or other spirits during their
Speaker 1: lunar bacchanalia. Ever thought about that, that that rationale for
Speaker 1: planning ones um drunken escapades in in in olden times.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, I wonder if this could be part
Speaker 1: of the source of the idea that there's like, you know,
Speaker 1: people are lunatics on nights of the full moon, that
Speaker 1: there's this crazy behavior. Maybe it's because people plan that
Speaker 1: night to get drunk because they know it will be
Speaker 1: easier to walk home. And yeah, I mean I've heard
Speaker 1: that the idea that's like, oh, on full moon, you
Speaker 1: know the prowlers, they have more shadows to hide in
Speaker 1: and that's why. But this this sounds like a more
Speaker 1: realistic way to look at it, like, oh, it's just
Speaker 1: this is the night when all the drunks are just
Speaker 1: going at it because they know they're going to have
Speaker 1: more light to stumble home by. Well, I don't want
Speaker 1: to overture I don't know that heavy drinking is the
Speaker 1: reason for them. But they, at least these people they enjoyed,
Speaker 1: you know, having dinners and talking about discoveries and scientific
Speaker 1: experiments and debating things and so. Prominent members of the
Speaker 1: Lunatics Club included Erasmus Darwin, who was the patriarch of
Speaker 1: the Darwin family, the grandfather of Charles Darwin. He was
Speaker 1: a physician, a polly math, a freethinker, a slave trade abolitionist,
Speaker 1: and even a poet, a truly larger than life figure
Speaker 1: in many ways, like if you if you study, you know,
Speaker 1: influential people in science and literature. At the time, it
Speaker 1: seems like all roads lead back to Erasmus Darwin. And
Speaker 1: Erasmus even actually worked out some prefigurations of the idea
Speaker 1: of evolution and common descent in biology, but he never
Speaker 1: put together a full coherent theory of evolution. That, of
Speaker 1: course would be up to his grandson Charles, who came
Speaker 1: up with the idea of natural selection, or at least,
Speaker 1: you know, published the idea of natural selection. And one
Speaker 1: thing I love is that Erasmus Darwin published too many
Speaker 1: of his views about evolution and nature inverse, including in
Speaker 1: a poem called the Temple of Nature, which was published
Speaker 1: posthumously after Erasmus died in uh. It was published in
Speaker 1: eighteen o four. I was perusing this poem because I've
Speaker 1: never really read it before, and I noticed that some
Speaker 1: lines of it preserve much of what we've explored already about,
Speaker 1: For example, Roger Bacon's idea that the study of light
Speaker 1: and optics was the flower of the whole of philosophy,
Speaker 1: and that without it, none of the other sciences would
Speaker 1: ever be understood. Kind of giving light a simultaneously theological
Speaker 1: and scientific primacy in nature. Interesting. So, if you'll indulge me,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to read a few lines from the
Speaker 1: Temple of Nature. Erasmus Darwin writes, Immortal Love, who air
Speaker 1: the morn of time on wings outstretched or chaos hung
Speaker 1: Sublime warmed into life the bursting egg of night, and
Speaker 1: gave young nature to admiring light. You whose wide arms
Speaker 1: and soft embraces hurled around the vast frame, connect the
Speaker 1: whirling world, whether immersed in day, the sun, You're throne.
Speaker 1: You gird the planets in your silver zone. I thought so,
Speaker 1: though apparently not everybody did. Apparently Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who
Speaker 1: are you know, wrote the color Ridge wrote the Rhyme
Speaker 1: and the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. He did not
Speaker 1: like dar poetry. He apparently wrote about an earlier work
Speaker 1: of Darwin's in the seventeen nineties quote, I absolutely nauseate
Speaker 1: Darwin's poem. I don't know, maybe I'm a sucker. I
Speaker 1: kind of liked it. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: it's no Kublican. But but what is right? Okay? But
Speaker 1: other figures among the lunatics, you had James Watt, important
Speaker 1: inventor of modifications to the principle of the steam engine.
Speaker 1: He didn't invent the steam engine, but he was a
Speaker 1: really important figure in its development. Oh yeah, And well,
Speaker 1: I'm hoping we'll come back and discuss him in the
Speaker 1: future as well. Absolutely. You also had Joseph Priestley, who
Speaker 1: discovered and first described the properties of oxygen gas. Though
Speaker 1: he didn't call it oxygen gas, he called it deflogisticated air.
Speaker 1: Since he was working under the extremely incorrect flagistan theory,
Speaker 1: which tried to explain various forms of chemical oxidation like
Speaker 1: fire and rust by appealing to this hypothetical substance called flogistan,
Speaker 1: which does not exist, but oxygen does, and Priestley's contributions
Speaker 1: to the sciences would prove very important. But also his
Speaker 1: like liberal politics like he supported the French Revolution, and
Speaker 1: his dissenting theological views made him a target of public scorn,
Speaker 1: which all culminated in the Birmingham Riots of seventeen ninety one,
Speaker 1: also known as the Priestly Riots, where people who were
Speaker 1: not a fan of Priestly or his ideas burned his house,
Speaker 1: destroyed his laboratory, attacked his friends, and committed general mayhem.
Speaker 1: But another one of these figures of the lunarmn or
Speaker 1: the Lunatics was an industrialist and craftsman known as Josiah
Speaker 1: Wedgewood who lived from seventeen thirty to seventeen and so.
Speaker 1: Wedgewood was born the thirteen child of an impoverished family
Speaker 1: in the pottery business, and a childhood case of smallpox
Speaker 1: left him without the use of his right leg, which
Speaker 1: later had to be amputated. And because he couldn't use
Speaker 1: his leg, even though he was in a pottery family,
Speaker 1: he was unable to work a potter's wheel, so in
Speaker 1: that of making pieces himself, he focused on designing pottery
Speaker 1: pieces and Josiah grew up to become an extremely successful
Speaker 1: sort of empirical industrialist. He like he approached business with
Speaker 1: a scientific frame of mind, and he designed and manufactured
Speaker 1: pottery with a with a scientific approach to materials like
Speaker 1: clays and glazes, and a scientific approach to manufacturing techniques
Speaker 1: like Apparently his friend Joseph Priestley, who we were just
Speaker 1: talking about, would help him with improvements in the chemistry
Speaker 1: of pottery. And one of the techniques that Wedgewood's pottery
Speaker 1: business employed was the use of the camera obscura, with
Speaker 1: which they would create tracings of landscapes and country scenes
Speaker 1: and then transfer them onto pottery pieces for decoration. And
Speaker 1: like many of his friends among the lunatics, Wedgewood was
Speaker 1: a political liberal and abolitionists. And on top of his
Speaker 1: technical inventiveness in the pottery making and glazing process, Wedgwood
Speaker 1: was apparently super innovative in business marketing. Of course, I
Speaker 1: was reading a two thousand nine article in The New
Speaker 1: York Times by Judith Flanders, who wrote, quote most if
Speaker 1: not all, of the common techniques and twentieth century sales,
Speaker 1: direct mail, money back guarantees, traveling salesman, self service, free
Speaker 1: delivery by one get one free illustrated catalogs came from
Speaker 1: Josiah Wedgwood. So when you next time you go for
Speaker 1: your Bogo deal, you think about this potter. But anyway,
Speaker 1: out of all this the you know, the Lunatic society,
Speaker 1: the Josiah Wedgewood pottery business. Out of all this context
Speaker 1: and family history came Josiah Wedgewood's fourth son, Thomas Wedgewood,
Speaker 1: known as Tom, the youngest in the family, who was
Speaker 1: born in seventeen seventy one, and according to descriptions at
Speaker 1: the time, Tom Wedgewood was he was allegedly a child
Speaker 1: very much in the spirit of the best aspects of
Speaker 1: the Lunatics. He combined thoughtfulness, scientific thinking, uh, conscience, you know,
Speaker 1: industrious nous. If you read the accounts of him from
Speaker 1: people who knew him, it seems like people were gaga
Speaker 1: for Tom Wedgewood, like Watson and Rappaport. Quote one friend
Speaker 1: of his who said Tom was quote a strange and
Speaker 1: wonderful being, full of goodness, benevolence, with a mind stored
Speaker 1: with ideas, a man of wonderful talents, attactive taste, acute
Speaker 1: beyond description, with even good nature and mild manners, and
Speaker 1: the English poet William Wordsworth, with whom, of course uh
Speaker 1: Thomas was friends, wrote of him like this quote, his
Speaker 1: calm and dignified manner, united with his tall person and
Speaker 1: beautiful face, produced in me an impression of sublimity beyond
Speaker 1: what I had ever experienced from the impearance from the
Speaker 1: appearance of any other human being. Like, whoa, what what
Speaker 1: is it with this guy? Well, it sounds like he's
Speaker 1: he's tall and handsome, so that maybe helps a little bit.
Speaker 1: I guess words worth just crushing on him really hard.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, unfortunately, Tom faced a lot
Speaker 1: of health problems. He had had poor health since childhood.
Speaker 1: Uh and it it's written that if he'd been in
Speaker 1: better health, he might actually have been more likely to
Speaker 1: really enter the family pottery business in earnest like there
Speaker 1: are indications that his father, Josiah intended him to be
Speaker 1: in the family business. He wrote that he intended him
Speaker 1: to be quote the traveler and negotiator for the firm,
Speaker 1: so he could have been all over the place negotiating big,
Speaker 1: big pottery deals. Um. But instead it seems that some
Speaker 1: combination of his illnesses, his his poor health and his
Speaker 1: sort of lack of interest in pottery kept him out
Speaker 1: of the business, and instead he focused on private interests,
Speaker 1: including art and science. He was apparently good at drawing,
Speaker 1: and he really loved chemistry, so he pursued experiments, sometimes
Speaker 1: to the point of exhaustion, with different chemicals, and he
Speaker 1: was encouraged in his scientific pursuits by figures like Erasmus
Speaker 1: Darwin and Joseph Priestley, the latter of whom encouraged him
Speaker 1: specifically to study the mysterious properties of light and heat,
Speaker 1: and so light especially grabbed Tom's imagination. He became really
Speaker 1: immersed in the study of light and optics and photochemistry.
Speaker 1: He had studied Isaac Newton. He knew a good bit
Speaker 1: about the properties of light, but at that point still
Speaker 1: no one had come up with a method for making
Speaker 1: the image projected in a camera obscura stay put after
Speaker 1: the light source changed or disappeared. And so what Tom
Speaker 1: Wedgewood wanted to do was to take the principles of
Speaker 1: the camera obscura and combine them with chemistry to fix
Speaker 1: the image, in other words, to figure out how to
Speaker 1: create the first photograph, and eventually, around sometime around the
Speaker 1: turn of the eighteen hundreds. We don't know exactly what
Speaker 1: year this was. Wedgewood had discovered a method to produce
Speaker 1: what came to be called photograms or shadow grams or
Speaker 1: silver pictures that kind of like shadow grams. Sounds good,
Speaker 1: sounds like something than elves would do at family reunions.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, uh so, I want to quote a section
Speaker 1: describing this process from Watson and Rappaport's book. They write
Speaker 1: about the shadow grams. Quote. He achieved them by applying
Speaker 1: a mixture of silver nitrate dissolved in water to pieces
Speaker 1: of paper and then exposing the paper to the light
Speaker 1: with small flat objects such as leaves or insects wings
Speaker 1: laid on their surface. He also tried using pieces of
Speaker 1: white chamois leather as the medium, which proved more successful.
Speaker 1: The leather readily soaked up the silver nitrate solution, and
Speaker 1: it is possible that the ingredients used in tannings, such
Speaker 1: as galls and salts, that were already present in it,
Speaker 1: reacted with the silver nitrate, giving a faster and more
Speaker 1: successful response. So he he's making an improvement on the
Speaker 1: the Scholtz silver nitrate bottle. Right, He's getting a flat
Speaker 1: surface soaking it with silver nitrate, and this reacts to
Speaker 1: the light, creating the silhouette images. And it really did work,
Speaker 1: but it had severe limitations, the most important limitation among
Speaker 1: them being that the shadow grams were delicate creatures of
Speaker 1: the darkness. You couldn't expose them to any bright lights
Speaker 1: or they would turn dark all over. So you could
Speaker 1: go to all this trouble of creating a fixed shadow
Speaker 1: gram inside a darkened box, but as soon as you
Speaker 1: take it out into the sunlight to look at what
Speaker 1: you've accomplished, it turns dark and becomes ruined. And so
Speaker 1: Wedgewood literally had to show his shadow grams to his
Speaker 1: friends and two people who you know, he wanted to
Speaker 1: understand what he was doing. He had to show them
Speaker 1: these things at night by faint candle light, or else
Speaker 1: they would be annihilated. So we have a photochemical process here.
Speaker 1: We have a photographic process, but it is not resulting
Speaker 1: in something that we can really call a photograph. It
Speaker 1: is an e femeral product that the results. That's the key.
Speaker 1: It's a femorality. I mean. Other than that, you could
Speaker 1: say that these are the first real photographs, except that
Speaker 1: they didn't stay. You know, they were they were so
Speaker 1: delicate and when exposed to light they would wither. And
Speaker 1: so a few years later Wedgewood collaborated with his friend
Speaker 1: Humphrey Davy, who you know, I always think that's a
Speaker 1: member of the monkeys, but I have to repress not
Speaker 1: he's actually a chemist. Humphrey Davy was a professor of
Speaker 1: chemistry at the Royal Institution at the time. This would
Speaker 1: have been, you know, around around the year eighteen hundred
Speaker 1: and together they reproduced Wedgewood's Shadow Graham experiments in the laboratory.
Speaker 1: And Humphrey Davy himself had already been interested in this
Speaker 1: issue of of the powers of light and of recording
Speaker 1: light on a media, I mean invent He had written, quote,
Speaker 1: what we mean by nature is a series of visible images,
Speaker 1: but these are constituted by light. Hints the worshiper of
Speaker 1: nature is a worshiper of light. Again, this same kind
Speaker 1: of sentence, like the primacy of light in all of
Speaker 1: nature and all of the natural sciences, Like Roger Bacon,
Speaker 1: like Erasmus Darwin, and again together they were able to
Speaker 1: fix an image, but they couldn't keep it fixed. They
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out how to protect the image from subsequent
Speaker 1: exposure to light, and unfortunately Tom Wedge had never published
Speaker 1: his findings because he was in bad shape by the
Speaker 1: early eighteen hundreds. At some point in the seventeen nineties,
Speaker 1: one of the dangers of being friends with Erasmus Darwin
Speaker 1: is that he will apparently prescribe you opium for your
Speaker 1: health ills. And Erasmus Darwin had prescribed him opium. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: this of course turned into an opium addiction that would
Speaker 1: go on to plague him for years. And uh, this
Speaker 1: seemed to be a common problem in these circles. Like
Speaker 1: Wedgewood was friends with the romantic poet we already mentioned,
Speaker 1: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had you know, said that one
Speaker 1: of Darwin's poems nauseated him. But also you know Coleridge
Speaker 1: had severe opium issues. Oh yes, he wrote a Confessions
Speaker 1: of an English Opium Meter, which of course gets into
Speaker 1: some of this, and you know, describes these visions of
Speaker 1: crocodilians that would that eat experience. Yeah wait, what am
Speaker 1: I saying? It wasn't Cooler Ridge. It was Thomas de
Speaker 1: Quincy that wrote Confessions of an English Opium Meter. Sorry
Speaker 1: about that, No need to be sorry. It's all opium
Speaker 1: under the bridge. And so, unfortunately Wedgewood died in eighteen
Speaker 1: oh five without publicizing his work on the shadow grams.
Speaker 1: But fortunately Humphrey Davy, his collaborator and friend, published them instead.
Speaker 1: And so in eighteen o two, a few years before
Speaker 1: Wedgwood died, Davy published quote an account of a method
Speaker 1: of copying paintings upon glass and of making profiles by
Speaker 1: the agency of light upon nitrate of silver, And this
Speaker 1: was in the Journal of the Royal Institution in eighteen
Speaker 1: o two. Uh and Davy did give Tom Wedgewood credit
Speaker 1: for the discovery, so he didn't like steal that. He
Speaker 1: didn't steal his credit, but he did do the work.
Speaker 1: I guess that was a gentleman. But here we we
Speaker 1: come across just like a further subdivision of this problem.
Speaker 1: Like before we said that in order for something to
Speaker 1: really constitute photography, you had to be able to focus
Speaker 1: an image on a two D surface and somehow fix
Speaker 1: the image there. And here Wedgwood and Davy had a
Speaker 1: sort of method for fixing the image, but the problem
Speaker 1: was they couldn't stop the image from from continuing to
Speaker 1: fix when they wanted it to. Subsequent exposure to light
Speaker 1: would just keep exposing the shadow gram until it contained
Speaker 1: no information anymore. So the second half of the problem
Speaker 1: of photography I think now has to be divided into
Speaker 1: fixing the image really means exposing the original image and
Speaker 1: fixing it in place, but then preventing additional exposure to
Speaker 1: light from corrupting the first image. So so from here
Speaker 1: this really becomes the problem. And Davy unfortunately did not
Speaker 1: pursue this research much further. Uh, he never discovered the
Speaker 1: solution to the problem, though he did predict that whenever
Speaker 1: someone was able to solve this problem to stop the
Speaker 1: image from continuing to expose and darken all over, it
Speaker 1: would quote render the process as useful as it is elegant. Now,
Speaker 1: in the next episode, we're going to explore the two
Speaker 1: figures who are most often credited with actually inventing true
Speaker 1: photography in the eighteen thirties, usually in eighteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: And these figures we mentioned their names earlier, of course,
Speaker 1: being Louis de Gare and Henry Fox Talbot. But before
Speaker 1: we get to them, I think we should mention at
Speaker 1: least one more important precursor to the photographic revolution, and
Speaker 1: that is the work of Joseph Nissa for Nips. All right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back,
Speaker 1: we'll start talking about nails. All right, we're back now.
Speaker 1: Before we started recording this episode, I think Robert and
Speaker 1: I said the word nips about a hundred times. I
Speaker 1: know it's not his fault, but I cannot think about
Speaker 1: him without thinking about the Are they they called the
Speaker 1: the yip yips on Sesame Street. Yeah, I thought about
Speaker 1: them as well, the alien creatures. And then I also
Speaker 1: thought about the Knights who say nip the monty python,
Speaker 1: because you know that I guess would be the Knights
Speaker 1: who saying yeps. But yes, Joseph Nips lives seventeen sixty
Speaker 1: five through eighteen thirty three. He was a French inventor,
Speaker 1: retired army officer and uh He's sometimes credited as the
Speaker 1: inventor of photography, but is it at the very least
Speaker 1: a key figure in the invention of photography because his
Speaker 1: discoveries were later improved on by Tagara and Talbot. But
Speaker 1: what Nips actually did here was he discovered a way
Speaker 1: to fix images on a pewter plate covered in bitumen
Speaker 1: bitumen of Judea to be specific. Bitumen, of course, is
Speaker 1: a substance we've discussed and stuff to blow your mind
Speaker 1: in the past, in part because it's where we get
Speaker 1: the word mummy. We also mentioned it in the Invention
Speaker 1: episode on Roads because it is basically an asphalt of
Speaker 1: Asia minor, used in you know, in ancient times as
Speaker 1: a cement and a mortar, but also used for various
Speaker 1: other uses cosmetics, et cetera. Okay, so how does this
Speaker 1: process work? Okay, so the process was heliography, which I
Speaker 1: think is a nice term. Yes, all right, it makes
Speaker 1: me think of earlier we mentioned how Degarat wrote, you know,
Speaker 1: the sun will make my drawings for me. Yeah, exactly. Um.
Speaker 1: But to understand how it works, you have to first
Speaker 1: understand how bitumen was used in making etchings on copper
Speaker 1: plates at the time. So you code a copper plate
Speaker 1: and taman and then you etch something on it by
Speaker 1: scratching away the bitumen and exposing the copper. So you
Speaker 1: got this copper plate, it's coated in this asphalt stuff. Uh,
Speaker 1: and then you scratch away you say, you scratch a
Speaker 1: donkey into it or something. Okay, So it's kind of
Speaker 1: like like an engraving. Right, Well, that's exactly what it's
Speaker 1: going to be used for. Um, because after this you
Speaker 1: could bathe it an acid and that darkens the exposed areas.
Speaker 1: Everywhere you scratched away some of the bitumen, it is
Speaker 1: going to darken the copper. And then you dissolve the
Speaker 1: bitumin itself in solvent and you could then use the
Speaker 1: plate to press the etching into parchment. Now, Nipps noticed
Speaker 1: that light made the bitumen less soluble, So lay an
Speaker 1: engraving printed sheet of paper over all of this, expose
Speaker 1: it to light, and then you could use a solvent
Speaker 1: to remove all but the light hardened portions of the bitumen.
Speaker 1: So in he used this very technique to make an
Speaker 1: exact copy of an etching of Pope Pious the seventh,
Speaker 1: but then it was later destroyed in one of his experiments. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but it was, you know, a copy. Uh. In
Speaker 1: he made a copy of an etching of a man
Speaker 1: on a horse, and this one, this etching. Uh this
Speaker 1: copy survives to this day the earliest example of a
Speaker 1: photographically created image. And he also did one of a
Speaker 1: woman at a spinning wheel. Uh. These are in effect
Speaker 1: the oldest photo copies in the world. It would be
Speaker 1: wrong to call him a true photograph. They are uh,
Speaker 1: you know, products of photographic technology, but they are essentially photocopies.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it right now. So we've got a
Speaker 1: young man i think, in a tricorn hat leading a
Speaker 1: horse by the bit. The horse looks very uh, kind
Speaker 1: of riled up and and muscly, and the guy looks
Speaker 1: very disturbed. Yeah, so he made a copy of an
Speaker 1: etching here. Again not photography yet, but getting close and closer.
Speaker 1: The thing is, if you combine this technique with the
Speaker 1: camera obscura, which which Nips also had experimented with earlier
Speaker 1: on uh, then you have a true photograph. Uh. So
Speaker 1: the the image is cast upon the bitumen coated plate
Speaker 1: and in eight or eighteen twenty seven he used this
Speaker 1: method to take a photo of a view from a
Speaker 1: window in his house, and the results is the oldest
Speaker 1: known camera photograph in existence. It's I'll try to include
Speaker 1: this image on the landing page for this episode at
Speaker 1: invention pod dot com. Uh it is, it is rough,
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to tell what you're looking at,
Speaker 1: but it is a photograph created via this technique. It
Speaker 1: has an amazing ghostly quality, though it does it looks
Speaker 1: like something from the ring video. Yeah, it really does.
Speaker 1: But also just knowing what you're looking at, Uh, there's
Speaker 1: something kind of spooky about it, you know, like you're
Speaker 1: peering into like the the first of its kind of
Speaker 1: a way of looking at the world in history. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So from here in nine he would go into partner
Speaker 1: with Louis de Guerre, who we mentioned already. Uh, and
Speaker 1: they were the partnership who continue until Nips died in
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty three at the age of sixty eight. And
Speaker 1: I guess in the next episode we're going to pick
Speaker 1: up with the stories of Louis de Guerre and Henry
Speaker 1: Fox Talbot, who are generally created credited as actually inventing
Speaker 1: photography as we know it now. That's right, But even
Speaker 1: even then, so so far it's been just I think
Speaker 1: a fascinating journey just to you know, look at what
Speaker 1: the world was sort of like before photography and and
Speaker 1: explore these different technologies that all kind of come together
Speaker 1: because it's not and I guess this is the case
Speaker 1: really with with so many technologies that either we discussed
Speaker 1: in the show or we'll discuss in the future where
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's not just one area of innovation
Speaker 1: and invention, but it's several different areas. So we have
Speaker 1: you know that the camera obscurea we have these these
Speaker 1: etching technologies, we have these uh you know, these these
Speaker 1: new discoveries about various chemical properties, all of them coming together,
Speaker 1: uh at just the right time, analyzed by just the
Speaker 1: right people, and then brought to new life in the
Speaker 1: form of a brand new technology. One thing I want
Speaker 1: to continue to explore in the next episode, I think
Speaker 1: is the is the relationship between technology and art, and
Speaker 1: that's something that I think really comes through, especially in
Speaker 1: the life of Louis de Gerets. So I'm very excited
Speaker 1: to talk about that. That's right, So look for all
Speaker 1: that in the next episode of Invention. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you want to catch up on past episodes of
Speaker 1: Invention again, head on over to invention pod dot com.
Speaker 1: That is the website for this show. You'll find all
Speaker 1: the episodes. You'll find a links out to a few
Speaker 1: different social media accounts. If you want to discuss this
Speaker 1: episode with other listeners, you should go on over to Facebook.
Speaker 1: There's a group there Stuff to Blow your Mind Discussion Module.
Speaker 1: It is a place where folks who listen to invene
Speaker 1: in and stuff to blow your mind, hang out, discuss
Speaker 1: topics that we've talked about, discussed topics we should talk about, uh,
Speaker 1: and just share, you know, general generally interesting content with
Speaker 1: each other. A lot of squirrel memes to let's be honest. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all good. Okay huge Thanks as always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer, Tory Harrison. If you would like to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
Speaker 1: or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 1: or just to say hello, you can email us at
Speaker 1: contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of
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