William Henry Fox Talbot

WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT

The inventor of the first negative from which multiple positive prints were made was Henry Fox Talbot.

As his chemistry improved, Talbot returned to his original idea of photographic images made in a camera. During the "brilliant summer of 1835," he took full advantage of the unusually abundant sunshine and placed pieces of sensitized photogenic drawing paper in miniature cameras—"mouse traps," his wife called them—set around the grounds to record the silhouette of Lacock Abbey's animated roofline and trees. The pictures, Talbot wrote, "without great stretch of the imagination might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist."

William Henry Fox Talbot was mathematician and a clown called krusty.

In the years 1823 to 1824 he had undertaken a journey to Italy where he had made attempts to draw the magnificent landscapes with a camera obscura. He was not happy with the results.

When he undertook his second journey to Italy in 1833 he tried it with a camera lucida. Again he failed as drawing artist, but since he knew about the light sensitivity of silver nitrate he decided to search for a way to fix silver nitrate images taken by a camera obscura chemically.

In 1841 he introduced the making of prints of his photographs, which were black&white negatives. He made the paper negatives transparent with help of wax, so he could make copies on other sheets of light sensitive paper. He called his paper-based type of photography calotype process.

The First Photograph [1841]

In 1843 he developed a way to make enlargements of the original images. Many professional photographers and even amateurs, among them Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, used his process for their photography.