William Henry Fox Talbot was mathematician, archeologist, and one of the most important pioneers of photography. 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 private 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 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 January 1834 he began his research on it, but the successful ideas came after he had read the tract of T. Wedgwood and H. Davy from 1802 about making object shadow images on chemically prepared paper. Talbot improved that 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 silver chloride 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/Wiltshire on such a paper with a camera which had been made by a joiner from the village after Talbot's plan. Fox Talbot fixed the images with sodium chloride solution, but when he heard from John Herschel about sodium thiosulfate 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 1839, 3 weeks after journals reported Daguerres invention of photography. Talbot got patents on his own inventions. He discovered several other photochemical methods.
In 1840 he found an improved process. He prepared the paper in soaking/drying processes with silver nitrate and then with potassium iodide. After that preparation the paper contained silver iodide which is not very light sensitive. Short before usage the paper had to be moistened with a solution made of acetic acid, silver nitrate and gallic acid. After drying the paper it could be used in a camera. With the new silver jodide paper used instead of silver chloride paper exposure times shrinked dramatically from hours to around 10 minutes. The images had to be made visible after exposure by bathing them in gallic silver nitrate solution. The fixing method was a bath in potassium bromide or better sodium thiosulfate solution.
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 (sometimes talbotype) process. In 1843 he developed a way to make enlargements of the original images.
Of course Fox Talbot became a great photographer. He and his employees, among them Claudet, Hennemann, Rev. Calvert Jones and Rev. G. W. Bridges, made the first photographic images of various sites and cities, on a high artistic level.
In 1843 He published his book The Pencil Of Nature. In 1852 he eased patent related restrictions after the President of the Royal Society Lord Rosse and the President of the Royal Academy Sir Charles Eastlake both insisted on such a measure for the benefit of sciences. 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 1877 in Lacock Abbey he had become one of the most excellent scientists of the 19th century.