_Originator of the Collodion Process._--As some think the credit of the
invention of the collodion process a matter of dispute, will you allow me
to remind your correspondents that the truth will be much easier to
discover if they will confine themselves to actual facts?
In No. 167., p. 47., G. C. first recklessly accuses MR. ARCHER of untruth,
and then tests his own claim to truth by quoting from Le Gray's edition of
1852, to prove Le Gray's edition of 1850. Why did he not go back at once to
the 1850 edition; and if that contains anything like an intelligible
process, why is it altogether omitted from Le Gray's edition of 1851, which
was the one MR. ARCHER spoke of, and correctly? {117}
The history of collodion is (as far as I know) this. In September, 1850,
DR. DIAMOND invited me to meet MR. ARCHER at his house, and for the first
time MR. ARCHER produced some prepared collodion, a portion of which
identical sample DR. DIAMOND now has in his possession.
MR. ARCHER had then been trying it some five or six weeks. His experiments
then went on, and in March, 1851, he published it in the _Chemist_. Let any
of your readers procure that Number, and compare MR. ARCHER'S claim with Le
Gray's, who, in 1852, states that he published it in 1850, and gave "the
best method that has been discovered up to the present time;" and yet,
singularly enough, in his edition of 1851, leaves out _this best method_
entirely.