Capturing Souls-The Birth of Consumer Photography

What this episode is about

The history of photography traces its evolution from the camera obscura—a simple darkened room that projected images—through the development of chemical processes that eventually allowed for the permanent capture of images. This journey took photography from an exclusive art practiced by professionals and wealthy amateurs to the accessible digital medium we know today, highlighting key technological advancements and significant figures in the field.

Key takeaways

• Photography's evolution: from costly film woes to instant digital gratification highlights our insatiable desire for immediacy.
• Camera obscura: ancient tech revealing that sometimes, the best way to see is to darken the room.
• Nips reinvented photography while battling chemistry—proof that even failed experiments can lead to groundbreaking invention.
• Modern cameras can capture astonishing detail, yet the first photo took days to expose—a real test of patience!
• From Nips's time-consuming images to today's selfies, we've transformed photography from art into a daily ritual.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Joseph Nicéphore Niépce · 1 min speaking
• Louis Daguerre · 1 min speaking
• Henry Fox Talbot · 1 min speaking
• Frederick Archer · 1 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: camera obscurer, heliography, Isidor Niépce, Angelo Salah
2. 3:00 – 6:00: camera obscurer
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Louis Daguerre, calotype, Frederick Archer
4. 9:00 – 12:00: amber type, tint type
5. 12:00 – 12:57: Richard Maddox

Notable quotes from "Capturing Souls-The Birth of Consumer Photography"

• Potentially have very different implications than you were perhaps intending. But while the camera obscurer and more sophisticated mirror or prisonbased camera Lucida allowed…

  about camera obscurer · at 1:13

• Eventually caused the rest of the mixture to darken as well, obliterating the letters. The person widely credited with creating history's first affix photograph was French…

  about Joseph Nicéphore Niépce · at 2:06

• Dissolved away the remaining silver iodide, leaving the exposed silver crystals behind. Dur invented the process of developing and fixing which have been key elements of…

  about Louis Daguerre · at 6:07

• York City alone. At around the same time, another inventor, Englishman Henry Fox Talbbert, developed a competing photographic process which boasted a number of improvements over the Duraype.

  about calotype · at 7:11

• Safer and convenient method than Dur's mercury and saltwater process. Unlike Dur Talbert chose to patent his invention and started charging a 20 licensing fee to any…

  about Henry Fox Talbot · at 8:15

• Popular variation of the collodian wet plate process patented in 1854 was the amber type which used shorter exposure times and special developing chemicals including highly…

  about amber type · at 9:26

• Other glass plates, from the mid-1 1850s onward, photographers began using the album and printing process introduced by French inventor Louis Blanquart Evrad in 1847. This…

  about Louis Blanquart Evrard · at 11:01

• Important innovation in photography since Archer's wet plate colloidal process was the dry plate process developed in 1871 by English physician Richard Maddox. Maddox created a…

  about Richard Maddox · at 11:53

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Joseph Nicéphore Niépce — Person · Referenced pioneer/inventor · 5 mentions
  Presented as the key early inventor who produced the earliest surviving photographs and developed heliography, forming the foundation for later photographic processes.
• Louis Daguerre — Person · Referenced pioneer/inventor · 1 mention · first at 6:11
  Described as Niépce’s collaborator who advanced the process into the daguerreotype and popularized developing/fixing via latent-image development.
• Henry Fox Talbot — Person · Referenced pioneer/inventor (competing process) · 5 mentions
  Introduced as Daguerre’s major competitor via the calotype, emphasizing negative-to-positive reproduction and the controversy around patent licensing.
• Richard Maddox — Person · Referenced inventor (process innovation) · 1 mention · first at 12:00
  Presented as the inventor of the gelatin dry plate process, enabling portable photography by removing the need for immediate wet development.
• Frederick Archer — Person · Referenced inventor (process innovation) · 1 mention · first at 8:47
  Credited with introducing the collodion wet plate process, a major leap in sharpness and practicality compared with earlier paper negatives.
  Ultimately lost. As a result, Talbert received little financial gain for his invention. The next major development in photography was the collodian wet plate process introduced…
• Louis Blanquart Evrard — Person · Referenced inventor (printing process) · 4 mentions
  Introduced as the inventor of the albumen printing process, enabling mass printing of photographs on paper with a glossy surface.
• Isidor Niépce — Person · Referenced family member / rights-holder · 1 mention · first at 2:31
  Mentioned as Niépce’s son and later as a party who, with Daguerre, agreed to gift the daguerreotype process to the French government in exchange for pensions.
  Demonstrating the complete process only to select members of the academy. But later that year, he and Nip's son agreed to gift the Durayotype to the French government and the…
• Angelo Salah — Person · Referenced early chemist (light sensitivity discovery) · 1 mention · first at 1:37
  Cited for an early observation that silver nitrate darkens in sunlight—an important precursor insight for photographic chemistry.
  Various light sensitive substances, particularly compounds of silver. In 1614, Italian physician and chemist Angelo Salah discovered that powdered silver nitrate turned black…
• Johan Schultzer — Person · Referenced early experimenter (light sensitivity observation) · 1 mention · first at 1:46
  Described as demonstrating sunlight could imprint shapes/letters using silver-containing mixtures, but without a method to fix the image.
  Angelo Salah discovered that powdered silver nitrate turned black when exposed to sunlight. While in 1717, German polymath Johan Schultzer observed the same effect in a slurry…

Concepts & topics

• Daguerréotype — Concept · 2 mentions
  To be captured. A man having his boots polished by a young boy. On January the 7th, 1839, Dur announced his complete photographic process, which he named naturally the Dura…
• camera obscurer — Concept · 4 mentions · first at 0:42
• amber type — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 9:30
• tint type — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 9:52
  This process was adapted to use lacquered metal plates to produce the so-called tint type, which while often used interchangeably with the term dura type is a completely separate process.
• calotype — Concept · 1 mention · first at 7:50
• albumen printing — Concept · 2 mentions
• heliography — Concept · 1 mention · first at 2:23
  Nissor Nips who also created one of the world's earliest bicycles and internal combustion engine. Nips's experiments in what he called heliography from the Greek sunwriting…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Today, photographs are effectively free, disposable, and ephemeral. But it wasn't always this way. Only a generation ago, relatively expensive film still ruled the photography market. Cameras could only take a limited number of shots. You couldn't see the results right away. And it took anywhere from an hour to a week to get your film developed and find out that all your vacation pictures were a blurry mess. Go back even further, and photography was the exclusive preserve of professionals and wealthy amateurs, requiring bulky, expensive equipment and a thorough understanding of chemistry.

0:27 But when and how was this technology invented? Who was the first person to permanently capture an image from real life without simply painting or drawing it? Well, pick your favorite filter and say cheese as we dive into the fascinating history of photography. The history of photography begins with the camera obscurer, Latin for dark room. This device consisted of surprise, a darkened room with a small hole drilled in one wall. This hole would act like a lens focusing and projecting an inverted image of the scenery outside onto the opposite wall. Though this phenomenon had been observed since ancient times, it was not until the 16th century that artists started making extensive use of camera obscurers as drawing aids, with inventors even developing portable versions for making sketches outdoors.

1:08 On a related note, in modern Italian, camera still means room, meaning that asking to see someone's camera there can potentially have very different implications than you were perhaps intending. But while the camera obscurer and more sophisticated mirror or prisonbased camera Lucida allowed for increasingly realistic drawings and paintings, there was still no way to permanently capture the images projected by these devices without an artist's efforts. But this began to change as chemists started experimenting with various light sensitive substances, particularly compounds of silver. In 1614, Italian physician and chemist Angelo Salah discovered that powdered silver nitrate turned black when exposed to sunlight. While in 1717, German polymath Johan Schultzer observed the same effect in a slurry of chalk, nitric acid, and metallic silver. In the course of his experiments, Schultzer applied

1:54 letter stencils to jars of this mixture, which he dubbed Scottors, and found that sunlight imprinted these letters in dark purple on the surface of the slurry. However, there was no way to fix these images, and continued exposure to light eventually caused the rest of the mixture to darken as well, obliterating the letters. The person widely credited with creating history's first affix photograph was French inventor Joseph Nissor Nips who also created one of the world's earliest bicycles and internal combustion engine. Nips's experiments in what he called heliography from the Greek sunwriting came from his interest in lithographic printing. Unfortunately for Nips, he was not a skilled artist and his son Isidor who was had been drafted into the army. Nips thus attempted to find a method for etching printing plates directly from real life without the need for an artist. His idea was to coat a printing plate with acid

2:43 and project an image onto it using a camera obscurer such that in areas where the light was brightest the acid would be deactivated causing the image to become etched onto the plate. Unfortunately, Nip's experiment in 1816 revealed that no known acids were suitably light sensitive, forcing him to abandon the idea. The following year, however, NIPS stumbled upon another promising material, the resin of garham trees, which not only changed from yellow to green when exposed to sunlight, but also lost its solubility to alcohol. It should thus be possible, Nips reasoned, to project an image onto a plate coated in gum resin, then wash the plate alcohol, leaving only the areas of exposed resin behind. This resin could then be used as a resist when etching the plate with acid. But while Nips achieved promising results by placing masks over the plates and exposing them to direct sunlight when he

3:31 used images projected from a camera obscurer, the process stopped working. What Nip didn't know was that Gakamoni responds to the ultraviolet component of sunlight which the lens in his camera obscurer was filtering out. In 1822, Nips switched from resin to a natural asphalt material called Bmen of Judea, which was also known to harden on exposure to sunlight. Once a plate coated in the substance was exposed to an image, it was washed in lavender oil to dissolve away the unexposed bitmen. The plate was then etched with acid and used to produce prints. In 1825, Nips used this process to create the world's first earliest known photographic artifact, a photo-edged print of a 17th century Flemish engraving of a boy leading a horse. But while this was an important advancement, the process worked best with high contrast images and struggled to reproduce more subtle shades, leading Nips to abandon it in

4:18 1827. In that same year, however, Nips made history again by taking what is considered to be the oldest surviving photograph of a natural subject, depicting the view out of a second story window at Nip's estate in the grass, France, the photograph was taken using the same bitchmen and lavender process as the earlier art prints with the total exposure time being on the order of days. Unlike modern photographs, the image was technically a negative and was only viewable under certain lighting conditions, the viewer having to tilt the plate so that the resin areas reflected light and looked pale and the bare metal areas looked dark. To create a more visible positive image, Nepes created a process whereby the bitchmen was applied to a polished silver plate, which after exposure and washing in a lavender oil, it was placed in a box filled with iodine crystals. The crystals would evaporate and react with

5:05 the exposed silver to produce a layer of silver iodide which would blacken on exposure to sunlight. In 1829, Nip joined forces with his fellow inventor Louis Dar and together they succeeded in reducing the exposure time of Nip's method from days to a few hours. In 1833, however, Nip died suddenly of a stroke, leaving Dur to carry on his photographic research alone. Ditching the pitchman altogether, Dur instead pursued the more straightforward silvery process, though exposure time still remained impractically long. That was when Dur made one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of photography. When silver halli salts like silver iodide are exposed to light, they decompose into their constituent ions, leaving behind crystals of metallic silver. The longer Dur's photographic plates were exposed to light, the more silver iodide was converted, and the darker and clearer the captured image. What Dur realized

5:52 was that even a brief exposure created a so-called latent image of microscopic silver crystals that was initially invisible to the human eye. However, treating the exposed plate with mercury vapor caused these crystals to grow into a visible image. Washing the plate with a hot solution of ordinary table salt dissolved away the remaining silver iodide, leaving the exposed silver crystals behind. Dur invented the process of developing and fixing which have been key elements of photography ever since. In 1838, Dur used his new process to take the earliest known picture of a person. The image taken of the Boulevard Temple in Paris appears to show a deserted street, but this is only because the people were moving too quickly to be captured on the plate's extremely slow photographic emulsion.

6:32 Two people, however, remain still enough to be captured. A man having his boots polished by a young boy. On January the 7th, 1839, Dur announced his complete photographic process, which he named naturally the Dura type. At first, Dur was highly protective of his invention, demonstrating the complete process only to select members of the academy. But later that year, he and Nip's son agreed to gift the Durayotype to the French government and the world in exchange for annual pensions. On August the 19th, 1839, Dur published a complete instruction for producing photographs, launching a craze for Dora types across Europe. The invention soon spread across the Atlantic, and by 1854, there were already 86 photographic studios in New York City alone. At around the same time, another inventor, Englishman Henry Fox Talbbert, developed a competing photographic process which boasted a number of improvements over the Duraype.

7:20 By virtue of using an opaque silver plate, Dura types were unique objects and could only be copied by taking a picture of the developed plate with a camera. They were also technically negative images with the silver crystals corresponding to the brightest parts of the image. And like Nip's early photographs, could only be properly viewed at certain angles where these crystals reflected more light than the background. Furthermore, the surface of a dura type was very delicate and could easily be smudged, requiring the photographs to be housed and displayed in special protective frames. By contrast, Halbert's process, which he called the calotype, used a photographic emulsion applied to translucent paper, which could be used to produce positive images by placing a developed negative at top another piece of sensitized paper and shining a light through it, a process known as contact printing.

8:03 Talbbert also introduced two other key innovations courtesy of his friend the astronomer and polymath William Hershel. The use of gic acid to develop and hyposulfide of soda more commonly known as hypo to fix the latent image. A much safer and convenient method than Dur's mercury and saltwater process. Unlike Dur Talbert chose to patent his invention and started charging a 20 licensing fee to any photographer wishing to use his process. This angered the nason photography community, especially as Talbot chose to interpret his patent very broadly and threatened litigation for even the smallest perceived infringements. This behavior resulted in multiple lawsuits being filed against Talbot, most of which he ultimately lost. As a result, Talbert received little financial gain for his invention. The next major development in photography was the collodian wet plate process introduced by inventor Frederick

8:49 Archer in 1851. This process involved applying a photographic emulsion consisting of collodium, a liquid mixture of explosive nitric cellulose dissolved in alcohol and ether and silver nitrate to a glass plate which was loaded into the camera wet, exposed and immediately developed. The collodon then dried into a hard plastic film fixing the image to the plate. Like the dura type, this produced a negative image which had to be printed onto another photographic plate or sheet of photographic paper to produce a positive image. In terms of the sharpness of the image, this process was a marked improvement over Henry Talbert's Cala types whose translucent paper backings resulted in fuzzy indistinct prints. One popular variation of the collodian wet plate process patented in 1854 was the amber type which used shorter exposure times and special developing chemicals including highly toxic cyanide to

9:36 produce a very light colored negative image. The develop plate then either had its back surface painted black or was placed in a frame with a black velvet backing, producing the illusion of a positive image without needing to produce a separate print. In the 1860s, this process was adapted to use lacquered metal plates to produce the so-called tint type, which while often used interchangeably with the term dura type is a completely separate process. As with the amber type, the dark lac background of the tint type contrasted with the lighter silver crystals, producing a positive image without the need for an intermediate printing step.

10:07 However, the metal backing made the tint type lighter and more durable than glass plate processors, allowing it to become the dominant popular photographic process by the 1870s. The amber type and tint type process greatly reduced the time needed to produce a photograph and were widely used by street photographers, catering to tourists and casual passers by. Despite these advances, however, the sensitivity of these emulsions were still very low, requiring photographic subjects to sit perfectly still in bright light for several minutes. As a result, a standard piece of equipment for studio photographers during this era was a headrest or clamp to keep their subjects head still during the long exposures.

10:42 The need to develop wet plates immediately after exposure also made amateur photography outside the studio a cumbersome process open to only the most dedicated enthusiasts, requiring the photographer to lug around not only a heavy camera, tripod, and glass plates, but also a dark room tent and developing chemicals. While positive prints of glass plate negatives could be made on other glass plates, from the mid-1 1850s onward, photographers began using the album and printing process introduced by French inventor Louis Blanquart Evrad in 1847. This process used photographic paper coated in a mixture of silver salt and egg albaman which dried to produce a hard glossy transparent surface. Unlike the original glass plates, Albaman paper was a printing out medium, meaning it produced an image directly from exposure to light without the need for developing. In 1854, French photographer Andre Adolf Eugene Distere invented a

11:32 camera that produced four negatives on a single glass plate. These could then be printed onto four album and paper sheets which due to their resemblance to the popular calling cards of the day became known as cartis. These spawned a popular craze known as cardamania with cart detoite photos appearing in their hundreds of thousands in parlor across Europe and the US. But perhaps the most important innovation in photography since Archer's wet plate colloidal process was the dry plate process developed in 1871 by English physician Richard Maddox. Maddox created a photographic emulsion consisting of silver broomemide suspended in gelatin.

12:06 He applied this to glass plates and allowed it to dry. This produced photographic plates that did not need to be developed immediately after exposure, allowing photographers to ditch their portable dark rooms and carry smaller, more convenient cameras in the field. This development marked the start of modern era photography wherein the technology became increasingly accessible to a larger number of ordinary people and the humble snapshot became a fixture of modern life. Photography would be further popularized and democratized when Maddox's gelatin emulsion was applied to flexible celluloid to produce the first lightweight photographic film. But that's a story for another day. Thank you for watching.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Capturing Souls-The Birth of Consumer Photography"?

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, Henry Fox Talbot, Frederick Archer.

What is "Capturing Souls-The Birth of Consumer Photography" about?

The history of photography traces its evolution from the camera obscura—a simple darkened room that projected images—through the development of chemical processes that eventually allowed for the permanent capture of images. This journey took photography from an exclusive art practiced by professionals and wealthy amateurs to the accessible digital medium we know today, highlighting key…

What is mentioned in this Today I Found Out episode?

16 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, Henry Fox Talbot, Daguerréotype, Richard Maddox, camera obscurer. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Capturing Souls-The Birth of Consumer Photography"?

The episode runs 13 min; the transcript is about 2,413 words in 18 timestamped sections.

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