THE
Alumni Journal
[Illustration]
Entered at the New York Post Office as second
class matter.
VOL. II. No. 2.
February, 1895.
Contents.
“THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF PHOTOGRAPHY,” 29
By Prof. ARTHUR H. ELLIOTT, Ph.D., F.C.S.
EDITORIAL--THE ABILITY OF CONSTRUCTION, 41
NEW LITERATURE, 43
THE MOST RECENT WORK, 47
NOTES HERE AND THERE, 48
ALUMNI ASSOCIATION, 48
COLLEGE NOTES, 49
SENIOR CLASS NOTES, 50
JUNIOR NOTES, 51
MEDICINE AND PHARMACY, 52
By N. H. MARTIN, F.L.S., F.R.M.S.
OFFICINAL OR OFFICIAL, 55
PUBLISHED BY
THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION OF THE COLLEGE OF PHARMACY
OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK
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Liquid Peptonoids
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your patient LIQUID PEPTONOIDS
“_That so he might recover what was lost._”
(Henry VI.)
THE ARLINGTON CHEMICAL CO.,
Yonkers, N. Y.
THE
Alumni Journal
PUBLISHED BY THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
OF THE COLLEGE OF PHARMACY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
Vol. II. New York, February, 1895. No. 2.
“THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF PHOTOGRAPHY.”
BY PROF. ARTHUR H. ELLIOTT, PH.D., F.C.S.
The topic of my lecture this evening is one of my old hobbies, so that
if I am a little prolix sometimes you must pardon me. It is something
in which I have been more or less interested for the last twenty-five
years, and, like most of our hobbies, we sometimes drive them to death,
to the discomfort of other people.
The fundamental ideas upon which photography is based are very
old--older than the Christian era, certainly. They depend upon two
facts: First--that light, in passing through a small opening, produces
an inverted image in a dark chamber. Imagine, for instance, that you
are in a dark chamber, outside of which is an object; that there is
in the chamber a small hole a sixteenth or an eighth of an inch in
diameter, and that you have in this dark chamber a piece of paper.
Upon that paper you will get a picture of the object opposite the
hole. That was known a long time ago. The other fact is that certain
salts of silver, notably the chloride, iodide and bromide of silver,
are sensitive to light and become blackened by light, was known to
the Egyptians. The action of light upon colored bodies must have been
known to the very earliest observers among men. The bronzing of the
human skin under the tropical sun must have been noted by every one;
and it is on record, in the most ancient annals of the human race,
that men--the fair men from the North--when they went to the tropics,
returned with tanned skins. Ptolemy, over two thousand years ago, noted
that beeswax was bleached in sunlight, and the old Greeks noted that
the gems which we call opal and amethyst lost their colors when exposed
to sunshine. These are some of the first and most rudimentary notions
upon the actions of light, and we have no definite statements about
making pictures without light. The Chinese have a tradition--and they
have a great many curious ones that are often founded on facts--that
the sun makes pictures upon the ice of lakes and rivers.
A Frenchman, named Fontamen, wrote an imaginary voyage to a strange
country, and among other things he said that objects were reflected
upon the water and when the water was frozen the images were retained.
So this idea of certain surfaces being capable of receiving
impressions by means of light was very ancient. There was another
Frenchman, named Devique Delaroche, who made a still more curious
statement. In 1760 he wrote a book in which his hero is wrecked upon
a strange coast, and the spirits of that place showed him how to make
pictures, as he called it, “painted by nature.” It is not quite sure
what he means, but his words are something like these: “You know,” says
his guide, “that rays of light are reflected from different bodies and
form pictures. The spirits have sought to fix these pictures, and have
a subtle matter by which these pictures are formed in the twinkling of
an eye. They coat canvas with this peculiar matter, and hold it before
the object.” The manner of holding it is not stated. “The canvas is
then removed to a dark place and in an hour the impression is dry and
you have a picture, the more precious in that no art can imitate its
truthfulness.” These words were written one hundred and fifty years
ago. This, as far as we know, was purely imagination; yet the idea--the
germ of photography--was there. We shall presently see that this flight
of fancy on the part of Delaroche was very near the truth, and foretold
what has since become possible, and only a very short time after he
said it.
As time went on and observations of men became more definite, we
obtain records of facts that were noted with regard to the action of
light upon certain chemical compounds. You know those old alchemists
had queer ideas, one in regard to their elixir of life, and another
that they could turn the baser metals into gold. They discovered a
material in the silver mines of the Hartz Mountains which they called
“luna cornea.” The word luna was at that time applied to silver. Luna
cornea was horn silver--what we know to-day as silver chloride. They
noted that when this was first brought from the mine it was white and
that after it had been exposed to the air and the sunlight it turned
black, and they also noticed that it was only the surface that turned
black--that if they scraped the surface off it was white underneath.
They also found that if they kept it in the mine it did not get black.
This observation was made about 1550 by Frobrishes, one of the early
workers in chemistry; but you must remember that they were not studying
the action of light upon this substance. Their sole object was the
turning of the baser metals into gold, and therefore they did not pay
much attention to this idea, although this fact was placed on record.
Some time after this we learn that a German named Schultze made copies
of drawings with a mixture of chalk and silver nitrate spread on a
level surface. The time of this is doubtful, but it was probably about
the year 1700. He passed the light, as he says, through translucent
paper (made translucent with oil or wax), and objects placed upon
the paper left a white impression on the mixture of chalk and silver
nitrate--or, as he called it, “lunar caustic.” This was in about
1700, as I said. About fifty years after this time (and indeed it was
a little more, it was seventy years, in 1777) Scheele, the Swedish
apothecary’s assistant, took up the examination of this horn silver. It
seemed to him well worthy of study; and as the result of his work he
obtained the first germs that led to the art of photography. But before
Scheele could have prosecuted his researches, and before photography
could make any important advances, there were two other discoveries in
science--and in optics particularly--that had to be made. The first of
these was the decomposition of white light, by Sir Isaac Newton, by
which he obtained the prismatic colors; that is to say, the colors
that we know as violet, indigo, blue, green, and so on down to the
red. That was the first step. The next step was the discovery by
Baptiste Porter, an Italian, in Naples, which preceded the discovery
of Newton (it was about 1590), that a small opening in a dark chamber
produced an inverted image on the wall of the chamber. So that between
1590 and 1666 Baptiste Porter and Sir Isaac Newton paved the way for
the researches of Scheele upon the action of light upon this simple
substance, as they called it, “luna cornea” or chloride of silver. Now
Scheele, therefore, at his time, 1777, knew of the discovery of the
prismatic colors, or the decomposition of white light by Sir Isaac
Newton, and he made the experiment of submitting this horn silver
or silver chloride to the action of light after the light had been
passed through a prism and he found the light as we know it to consist
of violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. Placing the
silver chloride in this band of colors, he discovered the important
fact that in the red rays the silver chloride received no change--that
there was no change made in it. But, as he got along toward the other
end of the spectrum, and got into the green and the blue and the
indigo and the violet, he found that the color of the silver chloride
changed much more rapidly, and he found that the most active in its
effect upon the silver chloride were the blue and violet rays. In
addition to this fact he found that the light discolored the silver
chloride. Scheele still further proved that the silver chloride was
decomposed by the light, and that chlorine gas, or, as he called it,
dephlogisticated marine acid gas, was produced. He became acquainted
with this previously from his experiments on the mineral braunstein
with muriatic acid. So that when he perceived the odor of the chlorine
from the decomposition of the silver chloride, he recognized the
gas at once, and he says: “When this silver chloride turns black it
gives out chlorine,” and that was a very important fact. At the red
end of the spectrum he found there was little or no effect upon the
silver chloride. This was the principle of the camera obscura, and the
principle of the camera obscura is the principle of the photographic
camera to-day. Practically the photographic camera consists of a dark
box, with a hole at one end and at this end there is a place to receive
an image. Instead of having a lens there in the front of the camera,
as was formerly the practice, it is perfectly possible to get the
picture with a small opening, say an eighth or sixteenth of an inch
in diameter, and, furthermore, that is the most perfect picture you
can get in a camera--a picture without a lens. Now, that is a strange
statement, and perhaps in these days it may appear a little wild;
but (exhibiting a photo about 5 × 7) there is a picture made with an
opening not larger than a pinhole, and it is a good deal better than
many of the pictures taken by the amateurs to-day. This opening being
so small necessitates a good deal of time in the action of the light
upon the sensitive silver salts behind, and that is the object of
placing the lens there. By placing the lens here, instead of having
a small opening, you make a larger opening which collects the light
in the same manner, brings it to the focus and then the rays diverge
again and you get the picture. Now, the rays as they pass through the
opening without a lens, begin to diverge as soon as they are in the
camera, but with a lens there they are brought together first and then
cross and then you get the picture. That is the first step, then, in
photography, the production of images by the camera obscura--and that
is all the photographic camera consists of--a modification of it. Now,
when the facts ascertained by Scheele, _i.e._, the action of light upon
silver chloride--turning it black and producing gas (and by the way
Scheele never found out what this gas was and to-day it is a matter of
controversy and a problem among chemists)--with the facts ascertained
by Scheele, in regard to the action of light Thomas Wedgewood and
Vueder made pictures, in 1802. These pictures were very peculiar. They
spread upon paper and upon glass plates that had some gummy material
upon them silver chloride--as a precipitate, and then they set their
subjects up, so as to get a profile shadow with a strong light upon the
surface. Now, where the light passed, of course they got a black mark
upon the silver chloride, but the silhouette of the face was in white.
Now, that was very remarkable, because they got some very remarkable
pictures of which drawings were made. They were white silhouettes on a
black background, but remember that the pictures that were thus made,
the white silhouettes (if I may use the term) were made by the action
of some light. If you wanted to copy them you had to copy them out of
the light; otherwise the whole mass would get black, and that was the
difficulty. In other words, the white impression could only be examined
by candle or some other weak light, and they ultimately became shrouded
in darkness and were lost--so we have now none of those pictures.
While they were experimenting in England, a man named Niepse, a
Frenchman, was at work upon the same subject--the action of light upon
various materials, but in a somewhat different direction. In 1813, or
probably before that time, he discovered that certain kinds of bitumen
were soluble in oil of lavender, and that when you exposed these
pieces of bitumen to some light the oil of lavender would not dissolve
them any more. He conceived the idea (how, is not on record), but he
thought that if he could coat plates with this bitumen and then expose
them to light in a camera he could get a picture upon this bitumen,
and where the light had acted the bitumen would be insoluble in oil
of lavender. Where the light had not acted that he could dissolve it
out. He proceeded to do this, and succeeded in getting pictures upon
metal plates. He then, afterwards, etched the plates and thus got a
perfect drawing or picture. So he used it simply as a means to produce
a picture by etching. Now, understand, using the camera, he obtained
an impression upon metal plates coated with bitumen. After exposing
the plates in the camera he washed them in oil of lavender and then an
etching fluid, and cut the impression into the matter and then they
were printed. Some of these pictures are still in existence, they say.
I have never seen any of them. After a time the plates were cleaned,
and by the help of an etcher’s tools or an engraver’s tools they were
cut still deeper and made very good engraving plates; so that his
object was not simply to etch them but to produce plates for engraving.
While this was going on Herschel made an important discovery in 1819,
and that was that chloride and bromide and iodide of silver were
not soluble when blackened by light. He found that after you had
exposed these materials to the light--this silver iodide, bromide
or chloride--and had washed all these with hypophosphite of sodium,
they would not dissolve. That was important. That made it possible to
preserve the silhouette pictures devised or discovered by Wedgewood
and Vueder. Therefore, after exposing the plates in the camera, as did
Niepse, the Frenchman, he washed them in a solution of hypophosphite
of sodium. That took off the chloride of silver that was not acted
upon by the light and he preserved the pictures. Some of the first
pictures that he made were rather curious. I have not one of his
original pictures; I wish I had, but I have a picture made in the same
manner. He took a piece of paper and saturated it with salt (he said
that he used Bristol drying paper, which was a peculiar paper, made at
that time in England). This was soaked in chloride of sodium or common
salt, and then it was dipped and had flowed over it nitrate of silver.
Therefore he had in the pores of the paper chloride of silver in very
intimate contact with the paper. Then he took such objects as ferns and
pieces of paper, cut it in various shapes, and laid it on the paper.
That produced such an effect as where the objects had laid they had the
white impression. If you took this out in the sunlight it would all
get black. But he made this important discovery and thus preserved the
picture. This was the first photograph made. We do that to-day, and
produce other pictures with various other compounds, but I will speak
of that later.
In the year 1824 we hear of another Frenchman (now, remember this was
a long while ago, in 1819, and we had no photographs yet, although
you might call that a photograph (exhibiting the fern picture) yet
it is not). In the year 1824 we hear of another Frenchman who was
a scene-painter at a theatre in Paris, and he had been using the
camera obscura to obtain pictures from nature from which to paint
his scenery. That is to say he had a tent built something like that
(drawing figure on blackboard) with a lens something like that that
was part of a right angled prism, and this light coming from the
view, the image was formed in here and spread out upon a table from
which he could make a drawing. He used that and was much annoyed at
the time it took to get those pictures. He was very impatient, like
a great many other Frenchmen. He conceived the idea of “fixing these
pictures” as he called them. He did not want to have the trouble of
drawing them. He said: “If I could only find some way of getting that
fixed on the surface without the trouble of drawing it it would be
a great convenience.” This Frenchman was Louis Daguerre, really the
father of photography. Now he worked independently for some time, when
he met Niepse, the Niepse that had been working on bitumen and oil of
lavender, and they formed a kind of partnership in 1829. Now, remember,
1819 was the time that Sir John Herschel had discovered hypophosphite
of sodium and its action on these silver compounds. They formed a
partnership in order to work out “scene pictures” as they called them.
In the year 1833 Niepse died--got tired of the work pretty much, I
suppose--and Daguerre continued the work. What his early experiments
were we have very doubtful records of. Daguerre did not seem to keep
very good records. In the year 1839, little more than fifty years ago,
he communicated to the French government a method for making pictures
in the camera upon metallic plates. In other words he divulged the
secret of the first photographic picture we have--the daguerreotype.
This was such a great success and such a wonderful discovery that
the French government pensioned Daguerre for his life time, and by
an agreement with them the process became public property on August
10th, 1839. Now I have the good fortune to have here to-night the
daguerreotype apparatus. This is practically all the paraphernalia of
the daguerreotype. First of all was the camera (and you must pardon
the condition of it as it is almost forty years old). I know of no
other complete set in the United States, so this is rather a relic,
and it requires a good deal of care in handling it for it almost
falls to pieces (showing the apparatus). Here is where the lens was
put and in here is where the plate holder was put. They first had to
fix the lenses in the ordinary way with ground glass. Then they had
a plate-holder something like ours, that they put the metallic plate
in. Now having fixed it, the next thing to do was to present to the
sitter this metallic plate, and I have here one of just such plates.
Now, into this plate-holder are fitted “kits” as we call them to hold
different sized plates. Unfortunately part of this apparatus is lost;
_i.e._, to say all these little details of kits, but they could all be
made out of little pieces of wood. Now, the daguerreotype is this: They
take a silver-copper plate (a piece of copper plated with silver. When
they first did this, they used to solder upon copper plates a piece
of silver, then put it in a press and roll it out. After that time,
in latter years when the galvanic battery had been discovered and was
in common use, they electroplated it). Now, this particular plate was
put into a holder that was held like that. Now the small boy was given
one of the buffers or he was put at a wheel that had upon it a backing
of felt and on the front of it was chamois leather (it is now long
gone on this one--been rubbed off). This plate was then rubbed with a
great deal of dexterity and you had to be very careful that you did not
scratch it. That was the most important thing about them. It spoilt the
picture if you scratched them. They had to be perfectly smooth. As I
said, this was sometimes done by holding the plate on a wheel, but the
ordinary way was by using one of these buffers. The silver plate was
taken out by undoing this screw at the corner. Now, the first thing
to do with it, then, is to make it sensitive. It is merely a silver
surface now. It was made sensitive by placing it in one of these boxes
(showing it) called coating boxes. Now that plate was put into that
box (showing the same box), and see there is the lime in the box and
it is now probably forty years old, having never been disturbed. In
that lime was placed bromine, and it was then covered with a glass
cover that fits over this glass trough or dish--it is rather deep.
This was then placed with a little pressure--in order to keep the
box tight and not let the bromine fumes get all over the studio--and
they put the plate in here and pulled this over, so, leaving it there
a certain number of minutes, and by action of the bromine vapor it
becomes coated with bromide of silver. Then they either put some iodine
into this same box or they had an iodine box. After the plate was in
there a few minutes, they took it out and put it in there and gave it
a dose of bromine. It was found, and by whom I am not sure, that the
addition of a little iodine or a small proportion of iodide of silver
with iodine of silver gave better effects. So it was then taken out
and it was sensitive to light. Now, Daguerre discovered all that. This
was then put in the plate holder and exposed in the camera and he got
a picture. And it bothered him a great deal, for it faded. If he put
that hypophosphite of sodium on it that our friend Herschel discovered,
it cleaned the whole picture off. There was not enough of it. So he
watched and watched and was weary with making these pictures and having
them fade, until he went one day to a closet where he had a lot of
these pictures stored, and he was delighted to see that the picture
of a certain monument (I think it was) that he had made he thought on
that plate some time before, and it was a good picture and a permanent
picture. How it came about puzzled him a great deal. In looking around
the closet where these pictures were exposed--where these plates were
stored--he found that for some reason or other the bottle of mercury
had been broken, and he tried almost every imaginable material in the
closet, and at last it struck him it might be mercury. Well, he put
some mercury on the plate and he ruined it. “Well, no,” he says, “it
is not mercury but mercury in a very fine state. I wonder if it is the
_Vapor of Mercury_?” He tried it and found that it was. That led to
the development of the daguerreotype. Then all he did with a plate was
to put it into a vessel with a few drops of mercury, and underneath a
little spirit lamp. Then he would put the plate in and watch the heat
(some now have a thermometer) and he would just pick it up every once
in a while to see how it is developing. That process gave to him the
first picture, the daguerreotype, and those are to-day the handsomest
pictures ever made by photography. I have two or three of them which
are partly spoiled, but to-day they far surpass anything we have ever
since done in the science of photography. After the mercury process,
it was very easy to wash the plate off. The object of the development
was this: that where the light had acted there the mercury seemed to
take hold and bring out the picture. Where the light had not acted
you could dissolve the silver surface off with cyanide of potassium,
which was generally used. But, if you will look at this old-fashioned
daguerreotype, you will see that you had to look at them in a certain
light; otherwise, you could see nothing.
Sometime afterwards a man named Fitsherbert, a Frenchman, conceived
the idea of changing this peculiar picture in silver plate into a gold
picture. In other words, he put into the plate a little chloride of
gold and produced a daguerreotype which can be seen pretty clearly by
looking squarely at it.
The beginning of the daguerreotype flourished only a short time. While
Daguerre and others were working at the daguerreotype, Fox Talbot, a
rich Englishman, took up the subject from another point of view. He
conceived the idea of making a negative. Of course, every picture you
took by Daguerre’s method you had to make a sitting for it. Such are
the pictures up in the School of Mines of William Lloyd Garrison and
Daniel Webster. They had to sit right down in front of the box, and
copies could not be had. That was the trouble with the daguerreotype.
You had one picture for every sitting. To make the difference between
the positive and negative more clear, I have brought here to show you
to-night (producing them) some positives and negatives printed on the
same piece of paper. When the picture comes out of the camera and the
plate is developing (exhibiting it) that is what it looks like--where
the light struck all the light parts of the picture are black, and
where the light did not strike all the black parts of the picture are
white. If I take the same surface, containing the bromide of silver,
iodide of silver or chloride of silver, and place it underneath that
and expose it to the sunlight, where the light strikes through it will
produce black, just as in the original object, and when I get through
I get the positive. So there is a negative and there is a positive
from the same picture. Now, that was Fox Talbot’s idea. He says “If
I can do that, I can make pictures _ad libitum_.” With this object
in view he coated paper with silver chloride. He exposed it then in
the camera, fixed it in a solution of salt--common salt or iodide of
potassium--and when he got through the picture was a permanent one,
because the iodide of potassium dissolved out the white parts that were
not affected by the light. From this negative he obtained other prints.
Now, various modifications of Fox Talbot’s process, were brought
out, and a man named LaGray, I think (or at least it was just about
the time he lived) conceived the idea of making these pictures more
transparent by waxing them. That was the first good negative we had.
It was a modification of Fox Talbot’s idea, only he waxed the paper.
Then about the same time it was found that a mixture of chloride of
iron and cyanide of potassium, when mixed together were acted upon by
light. Herschel discovered this, and that was the way we obtained the
blue print, which is far older than the photograph. Sir John Herschel
found that a mixture of chloride of iron and cyanide of potassium, when
exposed to sunlight made Prussian blue. So that if you take paper and
coat it with this mixture and then expose it under a negative you get a
blue picture.
The trouble with these paper pictures was that you could not eliminate
the grain of the paper, and if you will examine these close enough you
will see that they are blurred. This one printed from that particular
negative is blurred--very much blurred. These sensitive silver
compounds are so sensitive that the grain of the paper produces an
impression. Now, in 1848, Niepse, a nephew of the first Niepse, thought
it would be a good idea to use glass plates coated with albumen.
He took chloride or iodide of silver, mixed it with white of egg,
spread it on plates, heated the plates, which, of course, coagulated
the albumen, and that fixed his film upon the glass plates. That was
quite a step. Now, we had gotten rid of the paper. By the way, I made
a little mistake there about the way he got the picture. He got the
picture by putting salt in the albumen and then coagulating it, and
then he dipped the plate into a solution of silver nitrate and in that
way got the precipitate in the film itself. This was important but
troublesome and not always successful.
Now, a few years before another discovery was made. Remember that this
was in 1848 that Niepse worked with the albumen process. In 1840,
Schurben, a Swiss chemist, discovered gum cotton. This gum cotton is
a nitrated compound of cotton, made by the action of concentrated
sulphuric and nitric acids upon cotton. Sometime afterwards Maynard,
a Yankee, in Boston, discovered that this gum cotton was soluble in
alcohol, and ether, and then he found that by evaporating the substance
he got the thin film of collodion. Scott Archer, an Englishman,
conceived the idea of using this film as a vehicle for these
particularly sensitive silver salts for photographing. His method was
pretty much that which is followed to-day and that is still in use to
quite a large extent.
In this process we have this series of operations: First, the plate
must be perfectly clean. That is essential. Any little spot upon it
will form a nucleus which will spread over the surface of the plate.
The plate is then coated with albumen and allowed to dry without
heating. It is then flowed with this collodion, and in the collodion is
put the chloride, iodide or bromide of silver, which you need. It is
generally the chloride, iodide or bromide of silver. This collodion is
afterwards dipped into a silver bath, and then we get the sensitized
silver surface, very thin and perfectly transparent. It is then ready
to go into the camera. It is put into the camera soaking wet with
nitrate of silver. It is exposed and then developed with a solution
of sulphate of iron with some acetic acid. After it is developed, the
developer is washed off, fixed with hypophosphite of sodium, dried,
varnished and we get the negative.
Now, the curious part about this wet plate process is that it is
slow. The compounds are not very sensitive compared with the modern
compounds. In the second place it is essential to use it wet. If you
took the plate out of the silver bath where you sensitized it and
washed off the nitrate of silver adhering to it and put the plate in
the camera you would not get a picture. The silver nitrate is essential
to the production of the picture. It acts in this way: Where the light
has acted upon the sensitive silver compounds and you proceed to
develop the picture, when you mix the sulphate of iron and pour the
developer upon the plate, as the iron comes in contact with the nitrate
of silver, with which the plate is wet, it produces metallic silver,
which adheres to those parts of the picture which have been acted upon
by the light. That seems to be the philosophy, because if you wash the
nitrate off you cannot develop a picture upon such a plate.
Now, this process of photography revolutionized the daguerreotype,
revolutionized photography and the daguerreotype became obsolete. I
think it displaced the daguerreotype in three years. This process
was such an advantage--collodion was such a nice substance to work
with--that it revolutionized the photography of those days, and the
daguerreotype fell out of existence.
Now, when you take into consideration the time that people had to sit
for their pictures--five or six minutes--you can conceive how hard it
was to keep still. They had such queer contrivances to keep the head
straight, they screwed you up in various positions, and this was
particularly exasperating where they had to take pictures requiring a
good deal of time. Dr. Draper, who took some of these daguerreotypes,
and who I believe was the first photographer of these pictures,
desired to take a photo of his estimable lady. His studio was in the
old University Building in Washington Square. I believe Mrs. Draper
had to sit twenty minutes for that picture. In order to produce the
best effect he had a tank made in the top of the laboratory so as to
produce a blue light. Mrs. Draper was very patient while he was at
work with this, and unfortunately, Dr. Colton tells me, the result was
two pictures on the same plate. I should think it would. That was the
first effort ever made to take the human face with the daguerreotype.
Of course, with all that paraphernalia, with that slowness of action,
anything that worked within a minute was considered wonderful, and that
was practically what happened when Scott Archer discovered collodion.
This wet plate process continued from 1851 to 1871, about twenty years.
I have the pleasure of showing you an amateur outfit for this process,
used in 1860 to take to the Rocky Mountains (exhibiting it). That is
an amateur outfit carried over the Rocky Mountains in 1860 to take
pictures. Here is the old tank that carried the water. Here are some of
the bottles of chemicals, and the way it was managed was this: This was
hooked up, on the end of these sticks. This was the black cloth used
as the developing room by the operator. Here is a little window with
yellow glass to develop the pictures. The plates and bromide of silver
was carried in these two boxes. That was carried on top of the mule and
the boxes on the sides of the mule, so that he had a pretty good mule.
Now, to-day we do the same work with that apparatus (exhibiting
apparently a Kodak), and a great deal better work it is.
In 1871 a more important revolution took place even than the wet plate
process or the daguerreotype. Many efforts had been made to overcome
the use of the wet plate--the plate wet with nitrate of silver, and
some of the efforts were very successful but usually troublesome.
The plate was kept moist in a variety of ways: by honey, by tea,
by infusion of tea, by beer, by coffee, and a multitude of all the
funniest concoctions you could think of, but the process was destined
to fail.
In about 1870 it was conceived that you could make an emulsion of these
peculiar compounds of silver--these sensitive silver compounds--that
you could make an emulsion that you could pour upon the plate and
produce a picture just when you pleased, and it was found that by
mixing the chloride that produces the sensitive material in one portion
of your collodion and putting nitrate of silver into another portion of
the collodion, in certain proportions, you could produce a collodial
emulsion. They had to be mixed in just exactly the right proportions,
so as not to have an excess of nitrate of silver or an excess of
bromide.
But that process failed and only lasted a few years; although I have
here one of the plate holders used by such a process.
This was between the time of the wet plate process and the modern
dry plate, when they used collodial bromide emulsion. It was a kind
of a compromise between the wet plate and the dry plate. In 1871,
Dr. R. L. Maddox, of Bath, England, had the idea that he would use
gelatine, instead of albumen or collodion, as a vehicle to hold these
silver salts upon the glass surface, and he found, among other things,
something that surprised him--that when he put the silver salts in to
contact with this gelatine they became wonderfully more sensitive than
ever before.
The idea is this: That you make a gelatine mixture of a certain
strength--the proportions required a certain amount of soft gelatine
and a certain amount of hard gelatine. Into that gelatine you pour,
with constant stirring; you pour a mixture at the same time--some
particular bromide, generally bromide of potassium and nitrate of
silver--in a very thin stream and keep it thoroughly stirred up. If
you go too fast, you will not get the right result; but the result is,
when you get through and do it right, you get a beautiful milky fluid,
and that fluid contains bromide of silver in a wonderful state of
suspension--very thin--and it remains suspended in this fluid. Now let
that set--this cream or “emulsion,” as they call it--and you have as a
result iodide of silver and iodide of potassium. You let the emulsion
set and it produces a jelly, that jelly is then cut up into shreds,
rubbed through a sieve or something of that kind to make it thoroughly
divided, and washed thoroughly with water. Having done that it can be
melted, and if you melt it and heat it to a certain temperature, there
does not seem to be any limit to the sensitiveness of the material. If
you use it cold it requires a second or two to produce a picture. If
you cook it, however, you will find that it will become more and more
sensitive to light, until it is actually possible to take a picture
of a projectile traveling four hundred metres per second. I have such
a picture. The only trouble is that some of the plates made are so
sensitive to light that we cannot get a light non-active enough to
develop them. Having these bromide plates then in the camera--this
sensitive material coated on these glass plates in the camera--you
have got to be very careful that the light does not get to them. The
consequence is that the plate holders are made with extreme care.
The result of this gelatine-bromide of silver process is this: that we
can have plates in packages. We can put these emulsion plates and carry
them off where we please, and, what is still more important, we can put
the emulsion upon very thin material, and I have here (exhibiting them)
thin sheets of celluloid upon which this emulsion has been spread and
pictures taken. That is not all, either; they can make it still thinner
(producing small camera) they can put it on a roll and in this camera
is one of those rolls, and in that box I can take a hundred pictures
without reloading the instrument. The way it is done, I, when I want to
produce a new surface, simply wind the old one off with this winding
machine. There is an opening at the front of the camera. Press just
below this, so, and you have the picture. Now just wind the film off
and you are ready for the next picture. Now pull it again, and this is
so easy that some manufacturers say: “You simply push the button and we
do the rest for you.” That is nonsense, they don’t do the “rest” for
you. A friend of mine took one of these to Europe, and with it a dozen
rolls of film, all of which he used. When he returned he sent them to
the manufacturers and I think he got about twelve pictures back. Not
every time you press the button is a good picture produced. You have to
know a little bit about the science and use a little judgment.
Such is the state of photography to-day that this material can be
spread upon any kind of transparent surface. In the case of plate,
they are put in holders like this, generally only two on each side,
and slipped into this frame in a dark room, in which no light can be
used except one emitted through a deep red chimney. (The professor
here exhibited such a chimney.) Then, the material that is used for
developing these pictures is somewhat different from the old method. We
use organic compounds, alkaline solutions, and organic matters capable
of taking up oxygen. These organic materials, in conjunction with some
alkali, are capable of taking up oxygen. They produce a disoxygenizing
action. After dipping, that gives you the negative.
The prints are made in a variety of ways. The facility with which these
apparati can be used has led to an enormous variety. You can have an
apparatus something like that, or something like this, which is smaller.
In the United States there are to-day probably about ten thousand
professional photographers and thirty or forty thousand amateurs, who
usually do nothing but spoil plates. To give you an idea of some of the
work done, not altogether by professionals, I have picked out from the
number of pictures I have a few samples of the work. Here is a picture
of a cattle ranch in Colorado. I have one a little larger of a horse
race, but this is about as large as they can be made. That will give
you an idea of the instantaneous effect. The distance between the foot
and the top of the mountains is about twelve miles, so that you can get
an idea of the capacity of the camera, of the sensitiveness of these
compounds. Here is a Mexican picture which shows the great beauties
of the Mexican flora--the cacti. Here is a study “King Lear” made by
Buffler, the photographer. That is about as large as you can get. It is
a pretty large plate to handle. Then there is another study “The Five
O’clock Tea” some ladies at tea, by the same man as “King Lear.” Here
is another study, “A Game of Sixty six.” Those are all silver prints,
made with chloride of silver, using glass negatives and producing the
positives by having the chloride of silver in albumen. The best vehicle
to-day for making positive prints is albumen with chloride of silver.
It is found that if you take a mixture of gelatine and bichromate of
potassium, and put into the mixture some pigment and expose it under a
negative where the light acts, the gelatine is made insoluble and holds
the pigment, and where the light does not act the gelatine is still
soluble and can be washed away. Here is such a picture and it is very
interesting--“In Camp.” The shadows in that picture are on the white
paper underneath.
Here are a couple of pictures of silver, two Bavarian pictures. This
one, of a little girl, is by Einlander of Cologne, instantaneously
taken without a head-rest, which is a very difficult piece of work.
This is the same idea, instantaneously taken. Here are two pictures
very interesting, which were in the exhibition at Chicago. They are
pictures in platinum, showing that we are not confined to simply silver
salts. We have here in this last picture one of the chlorides of
platinum, the platine chloride. It cannot be spoiled in any way. The
picture is good as long as the paper is good.
Here is an example of a yacht picture. It is the English yacht Iris. It
is a fine picture. The yacht is travelling very fast.
Here is a picture on the East River, made by Dr. Habershaw, showing the
work of amateurs in this line.
I could tell you a good deal more about this subject, but there is only
one other thing I would now like to mention. Some of you, I suppose,
have heard a great deal about taking photographs in colors. We are very
near it. They have produced in France, Germany and England pictures of
the spectrum in the silver salts: that is to say, with the colors of
the spectrum. They are very weak and have to be looked at in a certain
light. They are the result of interference of the thin films. We are
doing something more important. We are learning to make the whole
spectrum. For example, we can to-day get just as good an impression
upon silver salts with a red light as Scheele did with a violet light
in 1774. That leads to what is called ortho-chromatic photography, that
is photography that will give us every color in the spectrum. It has
been found possible to make pictures in certain colors. A long time
ago, the spectrum was separated into three colors, red, yellow and blue
of certain kinds.
Now, if you take a picture in a red light of a certain character, and
another of the same subject in a yellow light of a certain character,
and another in a blue light of a certain character, you have three
negatives. You can make three negatives, one of the red light, one of
the yellow light and one of the blue light. Now, by taking pigments
and printing in a press like a lithographic press, you can make a red
positive from the red negative, and a blue positive from the blue
negative and a yellow positive from the yellow negative, and in that
way you may get three impressions, which is the result in the same
colors. You must not stop there, however. There is a certain amount
of shadow, and the result of it is that they have to what they call
“over-lay,” taking the three colors separately and superimposing them
in printing. Remember, the red parts of the picture are taken with the
red light. That is, suppose you put a red piece of glass in front of
your camera, then only the red parts of the picture pass through to the
sensitive plate. Then repeat the operation with the blue glass and the
yellow glass, and the result will be as above.
Now I hope I have not bored you by any profuse details. I did not
intend to. I only tried to interest you in one of the most important
inventions of the Nineteenth Century. The steam engine, the telegraph,
the telephone and the photograph are four of the grand inventions which
the century has produced, and I think every intelligent person should
learn something about them. I am afraid that I have had too little time
to do the subject justice. You can understand how much more there is
behind this superficial view. I only have to thank you for your very
kind attention.
The
Alumni Journal
Published under the auspices of the
Alumni Association of the College of Pharmacy
OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK,
115-119 WEST 68th STREET.
Vol. II. February 1, 1895. No. 2.
THE ALUMNI JOURNAL will be published Monthly.
Entered at New York Post Office as second-class matter
SUBSCRIPTION:
Per Annum, One Dollar
Single Copies, 15 Cents.
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reach us on or before the 20th of the month previous to the
issue in which they are to appear.
All matters relating to publication should be written on one
side of the paper only, and sent to the editor,
HENRY KRAEMER, 115-119 West 68th Street.
All communications relating to finances and subscriptions
should be addressed to
A. HENNING, Treas., 115-119 West 68th Street.
All communications relating to advertising should be addressed
to
A. K. LUSK, 1 Park Row.
EDITOR,
HENRY KRAEMER, PH. G.
ASSISTANT EDITORS,
FRED. HOHENTHAL, PH. G.
K. C. MAHEGIN, PH. G.
ASSOCIATE EDITORS,
CHARLES RICE, PH. D.
CHARLES F. CHANDLER, PH. D., M. D., L.L.D., etc.
ARTHUR H. ELLIOTT, PH. D., F. C. S.
HENRY H. RUSBY, M. D.
VIRGIL COBLENTZ, A. M., PH. G., PH. D.
THE ABILITY OF CONSTRUCTION.
At this stage of the world’s history men of ability and even of genius
in a certain sense are not rare. The result is that in all of our
institutions of learning the requirements become more stringent and
by the time graduation arrives we see the survival of only the very
best men. We find the same classes of men throughout life that we find
in college--we find men of energy and slothfulness, men devoted to
pleasures and by nature politicians, men of ability of construction
and men of power in criticism. While at College the training to-day
is chiefly analytical and the result is that men are prone to examine
everything closely and some even learn to take delight in tearing
things to pieces. There are some men who are utterly ruined so far as
their inward happiness and that of those about them is concerned by
their critical tendencies. They do this to the detriment of their own
energies and abilities of construction and hence never or but seldom
build anything, but employ their days in tearing down what others have
built. The critic is necessary and essential in every department of
labor where human thought is allowed entrance. Criticisms that are
honest always help the builder and are a gain to posterity.
It is questionable if it is desirable for the conscientious young man
to encourage in his life a too critical tendency. It is not necessary
to look at the bright side of the affairs of life, or even to look
upon men charitably, so to speak. It is sufficient for every young man
especially to look upon events of life as they are. It is decidedly
important for the man of aspiration to look upon life with its duties
when he has had sufficient rest and food and exercise. Wrongs may be
righted and errors corrected in but two ways: the thoughtful way and
the thoughtless way. The thoughtful way is always attendant of health
and with a broad minded and large hearted individual. It is not our
desire, however, to dwell too long upon the subject in the abstract
as we are anxious to reprint the closing words of Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge’s Phi Beta Kappa oration delivered last June at Harvard College.
He said in closing:
“How then is a university to reach the results we ought to have
from its teachings in this country and this period? Some persons may
reply that it can be obtained by making the university training more
practical. Much has been said on the point first and last, but the
theory, which is vague at best, seems to me to have no bearing here.
It is not a practical education which we seek in this regard, but a
liberal education. Our search now and here is not for an education
which shall enable a man to earn his living with the least possible
delay; but for a training which shall develop character and mind along
certain lines.