William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot was mathematician, archeologist, and one of the most important photography pioneers. He was inventor of the first predecessor of the modern analog photographic process with negatives as originals and positive prints as copies of the photographs.

He was born on February 11th 1800 in Melbury/Dorsetshire as son of cavalry captain Mr. William Davenport Talbot and Lady Elizabeth Fox-Strangways. Since his father died early he grew up at the homes of several relatives. Since 1808 they sent him to Hooker's privat school in Rottingdean, and later to the school of Harrow. He learned French, Italian, Latin and Greek, even Hebrew language, and he was interested in chemistry and botany. When he was fifteen he moved to private teachers in Castleford/Yorkshire. In 1819 he became freshman at Trinity college in Cambridge. He won several awards during his time there, one for his Greek poems, another for the best examination performance in mathematics, and last not least gold medals for outstanding academic accomplishments. After his studies in Cambridge he published mathematical tracts for which he became member of the Royal Society in 1831. From 1832 to 1834 he was member of Parliament.

In the years 1923 to 1924 he had undertaken a journey to Italy where he 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 light sensitivity of silver nitrate he decided to search for a way to fix the image in an camera obscura chemically. In January 1934 he began his research on it, but the successful ideas came after he read the tract of T. Wedgwood and H. Davy from 1802 about making object shadow images on chemically prepared paper. Talbot improved the process, finally getting persistent images.

He soaked paper with sodium chloride solution, dried it, bathed it in silver nitrate solution. In a copy frame he could make blueprints of documents with such chlorine silver paper. Later he repeated the soaking processes with salt and nitrate several times. So he got a more light sensitive paper, best if it was prepared with more silver nitrate than salt. At a bright day he could make a first photography of his family's home in Lacock Abbey on such a paper with a camera obscura. He fixed the images with sodium chlorine solution, but when he heard from Herschel's about sodium bicarbonate he used solutions made of that natron which proved to be the best to make the images persistent.

His document blueprint process was published in January 1939, 3 weeks after journals reported Daguerres invention of photography. Talbot got patents on his inventions. He discovered several other photochemical methods. In 1941 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.

In 1943 He published his book "The Pencil Of Nature". In 1852 he eased patent related restrictions. In his last years he tried to achieve a photographic process for natural colors but failed. His main interests at that time were electromagnetism and assyrian wedge writing. He helped to translate the wedge writings found in Ninive. Before he died on September 17th in Lacock Abbey he had become one of the most excellent scientists of the 19th century.