My mind is a bad neighborhood – I shouldn’t be left alone there after dark. So the other night I’m driving home home and there’s a truck in front of one of my neighbor’s houses, for this carpet cleaning service, Stanley Steemer. A truly normal person probably wouldn’t notice. A mildly disturbed person might wonder “are they getting ready to sell their house?”

Me? I think, “Why don’t they spell STEAM correctly?” If you read my blog much, you know that spelling isn’t always my strong suit (if they have a typo Olympics, I’m going for gold), so I’m rather triumphant when I find someone else spells worse than I do. Since it was after dark, and no one was home but me, alone in the bad neighborhood that is my brain, I went online and did a little research.

As usual, that research ended up connecting me with a fascinating historical photographer that I had previously known nothing about. I promptly wasted about 8 days of my life reading a number of biographies. How did I get from a carpet cleaning company to the most interesting photographer I’ve ever found? Well, I’ll tell you.

Way back in Maine, circa 1849

The Stanleys, a farming family in Kingfield, Maine, added twin boys to their already large family in 1849. Officially named Francis Edgar and Freelan Oscar, the twins generally went by their initials: F.E. and F.O. The boys were both constant tinkerers. Freelan, for example, wanted a violin as a child, so he and Francis whittled the pieces out of wood and made their own violin. No one is sure how good the first one was, but the Stanleys sold hundreds of violins for many decades. A Stanley violin is today a rare collectors item, worth mega.

The twins both went to Farmington Normal Training School, expecting to become teachers. F.O. actually did, eventually becoming principal in Mechanic Falls, Maine. F.E., though, found teaching didn’t agree with him. He moved to Lewiston and began a career as a portrait photographer in 1874. F. E. was quite a success and had a busy studio.

But for my boy F.E., just being an awesome portrait photographer wasn’t enough. He had to invent stuff, too. In 1876, he patented what is arguably the most important invention in photography since Daguerre invented the camera (6,324,413 models can’t be wrong). Without F.E., millions of soldiers would probably not have bothered taking their pin-ups to overseas, Hugh Heffner might have remained an Esquire copywriter forever, and millions of women would have had to wait until Photoshop was developed to feel inadequate about their looks.

That’s correct — F.E. invented the airbrush and developed techniques to airbrush his photographs.

 Of course, this was 1876, so he wasn’t so much brushing a little cellulite from his centerfold pictures. Rather, he was using it to colorize his black and white photographs.  That was enough to make him his first fortune, though, and fairly soon F.O. joined him in Lewiston and their studio grew into one of the largest in New England.

But Wait, There’s More

Most people, having invented the airbrush and created one of the largest photography – airbrush studios in New England, would probably rest on the laurels a bit, and let the cash roll in. But the Stanley boys just weren’t wired that way. They began to use the new dry plate photography techniques and decided, well, the dry plates being made just weren’t good enough.

Here they were, basically painting over their photographs with an airbrush, but they were worried about having the best quality film they could get. This is how I know these guys were really photographers. Who else would obsess about having the highest possible quality image before they began manipulating and distorting it until it lost all relationship with reality?

Anyway, being the Stanley Brothers, they began making their own dry plates. Then, in 1884 they patented a machine for coating mass-produced quantities of dry plates and relocated their newly incorporated Stanley Dry Plate Company to Watertown, Massachusetts. I guess since they were originally from Maine, this was like retiring to the Sunny South for them. By the 1890s they were selling nearly $1,000,000 worth of dry plates a year. Another decade, another fortune.

Leaving Photography at High Speed

The Stanley brothers seem to get distracted easily. In the 1890s, if you were an inventive type seeking distraction, there was probably nothing calling to you louder than the new concept of the horseless carriage. F. E. became rather obsessed with the idea and began constructing his own horseless carriages as a hobby. Internal combustion engines were being used for most of these newfangled motorcars, but F. E. felt that good old reliable steam engines were a better idea.

By 1898, the Stanley Brothers were exhibiting the first Stanley Steamer automobile — and copyrighted the name Stanley Steamer. Which is probably why the carpet cleaning company has to spell steam s-t-e-e-m. They also decided to sell their dry plate business to rival firm Eastman Kodak, so the brothers made another fortune.

If you’re like me, you may have assumed the Stanley Steamer was some crude locomotive-looking thing with 4 wheels. The first prototype may have been, but the Stanleys eventually developed steam engines weighing only 125 pounds or so, which were actually smaller than the internal combustion engines used on other horseless carriages.

Their cars also performed like nobody’s business. Their 1898 model had a top speed of 27 miles per hour (dangerously fast for the day). Steam engines have very high torque and the first Stanley Steamer could climb a 30-degree grade, something no other car of the time could do. Steamers were nearly noiseless (very different from internal combustion engines of the day), didn’t require a cooling system, had almost no exhaust, and were much more reliable than gasoline engines.

Stanley Steamers, at the turn of the century, were lapping the pack as far as automobiles went. The Stanley Steamer Rocket utilized aerodynamic principles way back in 1906. It set the land speed record of 127.7 miles per hour at Ormond Beach in 1906. In 1907, it briefly reached 150 miles per hour. Immediately afterwards, it went through an uneven patch of sand and became airborne.

To demonstrate just how far ahead of it’s time the Steamer was, during its 100 or so feet of airborne travel, it unofficially set the air speed record, too. Airplanes wouldn’t approach this speed for a decade.

Stanley Steamer Rocket, 1906 - www.curbsideclassic.com

They Stanley brothers were not only great inventors; they were also good businessmen. In 1899, John B. Walker wanted to buy the Stanley Steamer Company. The brothers named an exorbitant price for a company with one working prototype car: $250,000. Walker paid it, as long as the brothers agreed to not compete with him for a year. By 1903, the brothers bought the company back for $20,000 and continued to make Stanley Steamers until the 1920s.

Oh, and One More Thing

F.E. Stanley died in 1918 when the Stanley Steamer he was driving slid off of a rain-slick road. F.O. Stanley contracted tuberculosis in 1903 and his doctors advocated he move west to high altitude, although they felt even then he would only live a few years.

F.O. loved a remote location called Estes Park, Colorado. At the time, Estes Park was considered largely inaccessible. F.O., though, had a Stanley Steamer, with its remarkable hill climbing ability, and he could reach Estes Park easily. He bought 140 acres there, and built a home for himself as well as a luxury hotel for guests and friends from the east coast.

For several years, the only way to reach the Stanley Hotel was by a fleet of 13 Stanley Steamer 13-person carriages. It was immensely popular, though, and remains so to this day. You have probably know the Stanley Hotel, by the way. Stephen King wrote The Shining after spending a night there, and it was the setting for the movie of the same name.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

January, 2013

REFERENCES

Alef, Daniel: The Stanley Brothers. Their Steamer was Fast and Environmentally Friendly. Kindle Books, 2009.

Atkinson, Bruce: The Remarkable F. O. Stanley. http://bruceatkinson.com/stanley/co-life-stanley.html

Carey, Charles: American Inventors, Entrepreneurs, and Business Visionaries. Facts on File Books, NY, 2002.

Foster, Kit: The Stanley Steamer. Stanley Museum, Inc. 2004.

McNessor, Mike: Francis E. Stanley. Hemmings Classic Car, December, 2005.

Stanley Brothers Patents: Stanleymotorcarriage.com: http://www.stanleymotorcarriage.com/patents/FE%20&%20FO%20Stanley%20Patents.htm

Note: For those offended by such things, there is a small photograph reproduced below that has artistic nudity. 

You’re probably familiar with the film-buff game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. If not, basically you name any individual who is associated with movies and you should be able to connect that person to Kevin Bacon using no more than six individuals (usually less). It’s even built into Google’s search engine, you simply type “Bacon number” followed by the person’s name. For example, Barack Obama’s Bacon number is two: Obama and Tom Hanks are in The Road We Travelled, Hanks and Bacon were both in Apollo 13.

If you’re a photo history buff, you can do the same thing with Charles Darwin for almost any photographer of significance in 19th century photography. For example, Chevalier, who made the lenses for the original Daguerrotype camera, has a Darwin number of 4: Chevalier made lenses for Daguerre. Sir John Hershel showed Daguerre how to make his images more permanent using sodium thiosulfate. Sir John and Darwin worked together advocating Darwin’s Theory or Evolution and Darwin refers to him in the opening line of The Origin of Species. Similarly, Sir Humphrey Davy has a Darwin number of 2: Darwin’s Uncle was Thomas Wedgewood, who along with Sir Humphrey Davy, made the very first images.

It may seem surprising at first, but really it’s not. Darwin probably had his portrait taken by every well known photographer of the day. He made even more connections to the photography world because it was Darwin who largely legitimized photographs as the documentation and illustration for scientific books. Before that time, a well recognized scientist was expected to provide excellent drawings or engravings for his publications. Photographs were used to document places and scenes, but infrequently for scientific work.

Darwin chose to use photographs for the documentation of his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872. He had many reasons for doing so, but probably first among these were that one of his more respected adversaries, Professor Agassiz, planned to use photographs in a book refuting evolution. Agassiz massively shot himself in the foot on that plan, as we’ll discuss in a bit, but Darwin still liked the idea.

The best part, though, is the story of one photograph in the book, and the photographer who made it. The photographer, oddly enough, was Oscar Rejlander who was quite controversial in the day because he heavily modified his negatives to achieve the artistic effect he sought in his prints. That Darwin would choose him as the primary photographer documenting a scientific book was surprising. That Rejlander played a joke on the photography world while doing so should not have come as a surprise at all.

Darwin’s Antagonist

Darwin’s theories still are criticized by a few people today (Which we aren’t going to do in the comments of this article, OK?). In the 1860s, though, the criticism was constant, personal, and strident. In an era when gentlemen usually politely disagreed with their ‘respected opponents’, the evolution debate was more like a Fanboy argument in an online forum. Critiques were vindictive, pointed, and used facts only when personal insults weren’t available.

One of the main opponents of evolution was Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz. One of the more famous scientists of the time, he was a geologist, paleontologist, and biologist. He had issued the authoritative Nomenclator Zoologicus, a classification of all genus and species, and was the first scientist to recognize the past ice ages of the earth. Despite their difference of opinion, Darwin respected him as a scientist.

Agassiz did not argue that Darwin’s observations regarding differences in species were wrong, he accepted those as fact. He believed, however, that the Creator had formed each species ideally for its environment and this, not evolution, accounted for the differences Darwin had observed. Agassiz had also observed that when animals breed outside their species, the offspring are often either sterile, like mules, or could not find a mate because they looked different. (This happens with various species of butterflies, for example.) For this reason, he felt evolution as theorized by Darwin was impossible.

His arguments were persuasive, and he convinced a wealthy Bostonian businessman, Nathanial Thayer, to fund an expedition to document the thousands of animal species in the Amazon basin. He thought he could demonstrate theses species had not changed over the ages, proving evolution false, and planned to use photography to document his observations.

Agassiz did superb scientific work on the Thayer expedition, cataloging some 34,000 specimens. The photography aspect, though, contained some pretty bizarre stuff. Agassiz took hundreds of pictures, most of native women’s breasts. He then compared these to the breasts of fine Greek and Roman statuary, claiming he could determine race on this basis (1, 2, 3, 4).

Needless to say, his book A Journey in Brazil, was not the evolution killer he had promised. The photographic documentation that had interested Darwin never appeared. The images, apparently lost for decades, are kept locked in Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography today, and few of the images have ever ben released.

Darwin’s Photographs

Darwin had become fascinated by the fact that ”…the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.” He felt the experession of emotions represented instincts, and that these instincts might be similar between humans and various animals. Having heard about Agassiv’s plan to use photographs for documenting his book, Darwin wanted to do the same thing for The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Darwin spent years collecting and studying photographs and paintings of the various emotions. He corresponded at length with zookeepers, photographers, illustrators, and even the directors of mental institutions (he felt mental patients exhibited ‘unrestrained emotions’ that would make good examples), obtaining photographs and illustrations to use in his book. He did obtain several usable photographs, and, of course, a lot of connections with the photographic community that help make 6 Degrees of Darwin so easy to play.

Among the most interesting were photographs taken by French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne (who discovered among many other things the type of muscular dystrophy named after him). Duchenne had discovered that by applying small electrical currents over the muscles of the face, he could create any type of facial expression.

While this type of human experimentation would be rather unnaceptable today, Duchenne assures us the subjects felt ‘only the slightest discomfort.’ Duchenne’s method, in addition to obtaining whatever expression one wished to reproduce, would maintain that expression for as long as the current was applied. This was an important benefit in an era when taking a photograph required several seconds of exposure.

Darwin was quite pleased to have such good photographs of emotion, but felt that, even in his day, people might just be just a bit distracted by the electrodes and wires in the photographs. After all, the book was discussing the expression of spontaneous emotions and the photos above don’t look all that spontaneous. Darwin finally decided it might be better to make them engravings and leave out the electrodes and stuff.

Darwin also used engravings for most of the animal expressions in the book. That’s understandable since trying to get an animal to hold an expression for a 2 or 3 second exposure isn’t too likely. Unless the expression is ‘asleep.’

I suppose he could have asked Duchenne to do his electrode thing with some animals. I get tickled just thinking what the lab would have looked like, oh, about 30 seconds after he decided to apply that current to a gorilla.

But less than a year before publication, Darwin still did not have what he felt were acceptable photographs to illustrate most human emotions. He discussed the project with a number of the day’s photographers, but they weren’t able to deliver the results he wanted.

Thence Came Rejlander

In 1871 Darwin settled on the well-known photographer, Oscar Rejlander, to obtain photographs for the remaining illustrations. The connection between Darwin and Rejlander was obvious. Darwin often visited photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and considered her a good friend. Cameron was a student of Rejlander’s and recommended him.

The choice, though, seems rather odd because Rejlander was known as an ‘artistic’ photographer who posed and modified his images. Critics of the day felt photographic images should be ‘straight from the camera.’ Rejlander strongly disagreed. He felt photography was art and any means that allowed artistic expression was fair.

His most widely known photograph,Two Ways of Life, had been denied exhibition at the Photographic Society of Scotland because they considered it a false photograph — the print was made by superimposing around 30 negatives. The draperies, for example, are actually the edges of a tablecloth in his studio.

His best selling photograph, Poor Jo, seemed to be a spontaneous photograph of a homeless child in London. It actually was a staged photo of a model taken on the stairs in Rejlander’s studio.

By the late 1860s, Rejlander’s reputation had suffered under the constant criticism. He maintained good cheer and worked diligently, but his images no longer sold well and he was struggling financially.

But he had worked for some years capturing emotional expressions, especially of children, so he had a large number of stock photos already available as examples. There was also the fact that Rejlander was exceptionally good and Darwin had publication deadlines approaching.

The bottom line is Rejlander delivered and the book contains a number of is images, demonstrating exactly the emotions Darwin wanted demonstrated. In fact, 19 of the 30 photographs in the book are by Rejlander. Several of them are actually self-portraits of Rejlander acting out various emotions.

Rejlander’s images were critically acclaimed and the publicity the book brought him helped him stay solvent in his few remaining years (he died in 1875). Actually, the images were more successful than the book. Rejlander sold over 100,000 prints of the images he made for the book, compared to the 7,000 books sold in the first edition.

Ginx’s Baby

On of Rejlander’s images, in particular, generated rave reviews. It illustrates a crying child and was hailed as one of the first “momentary” images ever made. Critics, including many who had been unkind about Rejlander’s work, raved about the amazing quality of this image.

The picture became so famous that Rejlander sold thousands of prints in different formats, making it his most profitable photograph, ever. Part of the reason for the fame was another book, Ginx’s Baby. His Birth and other Misfortunes: A Satire by Edward Jenkins. The book was immensely popular at the time and Rejlander’s photograph appeared on the cover of some versions of it.

Rejlander, ever the jokester, later mimicked the picture showing that really laughing and crying were very little different. He even made a stereoscopic card of himself next to the picture, making a similar expression of either laughing or crying, which he sent to Darwin.

Rejlander made another double print near the end of his life, Rejlander Introducing Mr. Rejlander. The images show him on the right standing in front of an easel pointing to himself on the left dressed in the uniform of the Artist’s Rifles, a volunteer military brigade of which he was a proud member (he asked to be buried in his uniform).

But there’s a bit more to it. The Rejlander standing on the right is wearing the same clothing  he did when posing for some of the images in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The easel behind him is displaying Ginx’s Baby. If you look carefully, you’ll notice ‘military’ Rejlander is standing on the same steps used in his posed photograph Poor Jo.

Rejlander seems to be celebrating his two best selling images. But it turns out there was a bit more to it than that. Just as Poor Jo was an image supposedly showing a homeless child in London, it turns out Ginx’s child is an image supposedly showing a photograph.

The original photograph, maintained in Darwin’s archives, was taken from a further distance and the child is much smaller in proportion to the image. In all likelihood, Rejlander had to use a fairly wide angle lens to get a short enough exposure time. Cropping the image for the Heliotype process used for the book would have left it lacking significant detail.

Rejlander was a trained artist and draftsman. He apparently used a technique he’d used several times in the past: he taped the image to an otherwise blacked out window, put his view camera in front of it, and used the camera’s lens to project the image on a paper. He then outlined the projected photograph, filled in the outline with chalk, and finally took a close-up photograph of the resulting painting.

The image remains true to life, although Rejlander added a chair rather than the toddler-holder-on-a-table seen in the original photograph. Darwin’s notes show clearly that Rejlander had sent the final image labelled ‘photograph of chalk drawing.’ A few early copies of the book contained the original unretouched photograph, but the vast majority have the photograph of the drawing. It has been speculated that the original image reproduced so badly that the photo-drawing was substituted for it very quickly. In either case, however, the text in the book labels the image as a photograph.

This may have been an accident oversight following the change, or simply Darwin’s judgement call (he felt the drawing was faithful to the photograph), or the publisher not wanting to reprint the text associated with the photograph. But whatever the reason, the image was clearly labeled as a photograph in the book and neither Darwin nor Rejlander corrected any of the many rave reviews of the image that occurred after the book’s release.

Certainly Rejlander, who had received so much criticism for his ‘obviously retouched and staged’ photographs probably loved the fact that the critics didn’t have any questions of the authenticity of this image. And it was also incredibly well done. The original chalk drawing was in the collection of the Royal Photographic Society for years and was labelled as a hand-coloured photograph. If not for the original image and final images labelled as ‘photograph of chalk drawing’ being found in Darwin’s archives, it might never have been discovered.

It should also be noted that Rejlander became ill soon after the book was published and died just a few years later. Being unable to work and making significant money for the first time in his life, one can understand he was not too eager to correct the public’s perception that it was an actual photograph.

I wonder, though, if his Rejlander introducing Rejlander photograph was his way of leaving a message for the critics when they finally discovered the truth.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

November, 2012

Note: If you don’t mind reading some 1860s prose, Rejlander’s article linked below is a marvelous defense of art in photography.

Other References:

Rejlander, Oscar: An Apology for Art Photography. Read at a meeting of the South London Photographic Society, 1863.

http://www.psiquifotos.com/2009/04/56-el-ginxs-baby-de-reijlander-y-darwin.html

Prodger, P. Darwin’s Camera. Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution.Oxford University Press. 2008

Lenoir, Timothy: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication. Stanford University Press. 1998.

“I am going to make a name for myself. If I fail, you will never hear of me again.”   Edward Muggeridge

I love writing about great photographers. I’m sure there are some exceptions, but in general they tend to be among the oddest and most interesting groups of people on the planet. I thought the photographer who did post-processing in the 1860s was amazing. I was totally entertained by the life of the hard-drinking New Zealander who took the first telephoto photographs. Not to mention the half-dozen figures that dominated the early days of camera development.

But I’ve never found one that met my double criteria of being both a landmark in photography and being a totally bizarre human being more than today’s subject.

He had successful careers as a bookseller, landscape photographer, travel photographer, academic and scientific photographer, and patented numerous inventions. His early work in Yosemite and the American West became one of Ansel Adam’s inspirations. His later work revolutionized the way things were painted and sculpted. He is considered both the first scientific photographer and the first cinematographer (Important to me because I enjoy tormenting the video techs with frequent lectures about cinematography being a minor branch of photography).

In Britain, plaques at the Royal Photographic Society, the British Film Institute, and Kingston Museum honor him. He was honored as one of the 4 ‘pioneers of communication’ by the U. S. Postal Service, and by exhibits at the Smithsonian Institute. He is also honored by plaques and statues at Stanford University, which he would certainly hate to know about.

He was also the subject of two plays, numerous biographies, two motion pictures, and even an opera. Director Mark Neal filmed U2′s music video “Lemon” as a tribute to his work. Most recently, he became one of only two photographers (that I’m aware of) to have a day as a “Google Doodle.”  He’s also one of only two photographers that I know of to be the subject of a historical novel (the other was Phillipe Halsman).

His work certainly deserved all of the accolades, but, as we say in the South, he “weren’t quite right.”  He murdered his wife’s lover in front of witnesses and was quite surprised that people didn’t understand it was the right thing to do. He sued arguably the richest man in the world multiple times and later claimed Thomas Edison stole his ideas. He took a college professorship to photograph moving animals and then decided since humans were animals he should take photographs of undressed ladies moving around. He died (according to legend) naked while digging a scale model of the Great Lakes in his back yard.

In other words, he was the perfect subject for one of my blog posts. But I should warn you: this one is a bit of a long read.

“The man is insane. A genius, but completely insane.”  Thomas Edison discussing Eadweard Muybridge in the historical novel Freezing Time: The Autobiography of Eadweard Muybridge.

“I would hesitate to call him a thief but that will do until I can think of a more apt description.”  Eadweard Muybridge regarding Thomas Edison in the historical novel Freezing Time: The Autobiography of Eadweard Muybridge.

Edward Muggeridge

Edward James Muggeridge was born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, in 1830. He had a middle class upbringing as the son of a fairly successful coal and grain merchant. He emigrated to the United States at age 25, eventually making his way to San Francisco where he opened a successful bookstore. He shared a building with popular photographer Silas Selleck and also began selling engravings and photographic prints.

In 1860 he sold the store to his brother and planned a trip to England and Europe to buy more books. He took the Butterfield Overland Stage to New York, but during the trip the stagecoach crashed. One passenger was killed and Muggeridge badly injured. He was in a coma for 9 days and obviously had a significant brain injury, having double vision, seizures, and losing his senses of taste and smell for months after the accident.

Although it wasn’t recognized at the time, the description of his symptoms would today be considered to indicate injury to the frontal cortex of the brain. This might have led to some of the poor emotional control and eccentric behavior Muybridge exhibited throughout his later life.

He completed his recovery back in England and decided to stay there for a bit, since the American Civil War had broken out at the time. He apparently learned, or began practicing, photography during his time in England, since he is known to have exhibited photographs at the Great London Exhibition of 1862. He was busy in other ways, too, obtaining patents for a new type of washing machine and a printing plate. He apparently made quite a bit of money, then lost it all in the English banking crisis of 1865.

During this time he also changed his name from Muggeridge to Maybridge and then Muybridge.

Early Photography

Muybridge returned to the U. S in 1866, living in San Francisco and listing himself as Edward Muybridge, Photographer. He concentrated on landscapes, converting a wagon into a portable darkroom. He made large prints, picture albums, and stereographs which all sold well.

His reputation was made in the late 1860s when his large views of Yosemite Valley became published. Unlike the romantic photographers of the day, who emphasized soft, misty views, Muybridge attempted to create sharp detailed images. His style was emulated by later Western landscape photographers like Paul Strand and Ansel Adams.

Muybridge’s landscapes differed from others of the day in their very realistic skies and cloud formations. Muybridge is arguably credited as the first photographer to use a split neutral density filter in his landscape work to avoid overexposing the sky. The truth is, though, that Muybridge also kept a large stack of cloud and sky negatives in his darkroom. If the sky was blown out of a photograph he just placed a nice sky-and-cloud negative behind it when he made his final prints. Truly, the man was ahead of his time.

Muybridge was also known to be rather obsessive and something of a daredevil. His photographs of Yosemite and other Western landscapes often show locations other photographers never saw. Muybridge travelled into areas considered to inaccessible or too dangerous by other photographers and often shot from locations like ledges along cliff edges. His assistants of that time recall lowering Muybridge and his heavy view cameras on ropes over cliffs so he could get exactly the shot he wanted.

The U. S. and California governments hired him for several projects. In 1867, the United States bought the Alaskan Territory from Russia for 7.2 million dollars. The decision was widely unpopular before the discovery of gold in Alaska and most Americans thought of Alaska as a frozen wasteland. The government hired Muybridge to photograph Alaska and his images were widely circulated to support the idea that Alaska contained valuable and interesting real estate.

He also photographed the Modoc Indian war for the U. S. Army. Other than photographs of campsites and tents, there was little with which to meet the demand for images of the ‘war,’ which involved about 50 Native Americans who fought 500 cavalrymen for 6 months. Muybridge used a little creative license, getting the Army’s Indian scouts to pose and later labeling the images “Modoc braves awaiting in ambush.”

Muybridge was very well known by 1870, although by a slightly different name.  He changed it one final time, from Edward to Eadweard, because he felt an affinity for the ancient English Kings who spelled their name that way. But he signed his photographs “Helios”, the god of light.

His landscapes were sold all over the world. His photographs of San Francisco, including some of the earliest panoramas, were extremely popular. He was hired by San Francisco’s many millionaires to photograph their magnificent new homes and families. If his career had ended then, he would still be discussed today as one of the better photographers of the era. But Eadweard was just getting started.

Muybridge and Stanford

Being one of the premier photographers in the San Francisco area, it isn’t surprising that Muybridge took commissions from Leland Stanford. Stanford had made a fortune as a merchant during the California gold rush, become Governor of California, and was majority owner of the Central Pacific Railroad (the Western half of the first transcontinental railroad). Muybridge was hired to photograph two of Stanford’s homes, as well as his family.

To keep himself from getting bored when he wasn’t busy completing his plans for world domination, Stanford had a large horse-breeding ranch (the location is Palo Alto, California today). Stanford was interested in the gait of the horse, and particularly in one of the unanswered questions of the day: whether all 4 hooves were ever off of the ground at the same time.

Stanford told Muybridge to take pictures of his horses running to demonstrate if the hooves ever all left the ground. When Muybridge explained that the cameras of the day couldn’t possibly take such a short exposure, Stanford, offered him $2,000, an unlimited expense account, and the assistance of a couple of engineers. Muybridge decided that perhaps it could be done after all.

There is an urban legend that Stanford had made a $25,000 bet regarding this, but the truth is he had read Étienne-Jules Marey’s book Animal Mechanism, which suggested a photograph could be made of a horse running, and that it would show all 4 feet off of the ground at once. At any rate, Stanford’s expenses for the project totaled over $50,000, so he would still have lost money even if he had won such a bet.

Today, the concept of ‘stop-action’ photography is taken for granted. In those days, photographers timed their exposures using their hat to cover and uncover the lens while they counted “1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi.” The idea of exposures lasting a fraction of a second was unheard of.

Muybridge designed a simple wooden shutter that would allow short exposure times. He also experimented with different chemical combinations for both plates and developers that were more light sensitive, used white sheets and reflectors to maximize the available light, and only photographed on sunny summer days. In late 1872 or early 1873 (there is some disagreement on the exact date) he was able to make a rather blurry silhouette photograph of Stanford’s trotter ‘Occident’ that showed all 4 feet off of the ground.

Stanford and Muybridge claimed success, but there is significant controversy. No negatives exist and the positives seem to indicate a photograph of a painting of a running horse. It has since been said that Muybridge projected the blurry original negative through a magic lantern, had a local artist paint the projection onto a canvas, and then photographed the panted canvas to make his final print. It makes a little Photoshop manipulation seem rather benign, doesn’t it?

Nevertheless, this photograph vaulted Muybridge from well-recognized landscape photographer to national fame as someone who was taking photographs of things never seen before. Newspapers across the country published engravings of his photograph, and with few exceptions praised the work. There would be an interruption, however, before Muybridge could capitalize on his new fame.

The Murderous Photographer

While Muybridge’s professional life was doing well in the mid 1870′s, his personal life was not. Muybridge had reached his mid-forties still a bachelor. This is probably not too surprising, since in California there were 10 males for every female.

In 1871, however, he met a much younger woman, Flora Shallcross Stone, who was working as a shop girl. Muybridge, although much older, was well known and well to do. Flora was all over him like Salmonella on warm chicken. Despite the misgivings of his friends (Flora had a ‘colorful’ past and at 21 was already a divorcee, something quite rare in those days) they were married in 1872.

Muybridge spent several months traveling throughout the wilderness each year on various photographic assignments. During his absences Flora was escorted to various plays and concerts by a local drama critic, Harry Larkyns.

When Flora gave birth to their first child in 1874, Muybridge was overjoyed. Some months later, however, the midwife who attended the birth told Muybridge the child was not his and produced as evidence several letters Flora had written to Larkyns, professing her love and telling Larkyns her child was really his.

Muybridge calmly walked to his studio, loaded one of the guns he carried on his many trips into the wilderness, took a ferryboat across the bay, and hired a coach to drive him to a mining camp where Larkyn was working. In front of a dozen witnesses playing poker, Muybridge walked up to Larkyns, said, “Good evening. My name is Muybridge. I have a message for you from my wife.” and shot him. Larkyns died instantly. Muybridge handed his gun to the innkeeper, apologized to the card players for interrupting their game, and sat calmly until he was arrested.

Muybridge’s lawyers, apparently hired by Stanford, presented a plea of insanity and called multiple witnesses who testified about Muybridge’s strange behavior and ‘fits’ since his stagecoach accident. Apparently Muybridge became somewhat offended by this talk of insanity, insisted on taking the stand himself, and told the jury he was not insane. To put a little icing on the cake, he added that if given the opportunity, he would kill Larkyns again. (Personally, I think if you’re facing a death sentence, your lawyers enter an insanity plea, and you then tell the jury you aren’t insane — well, you are.)

Somewhat in desperation after Muybridge nuked his own insanity defense, Pendergast turned to his considerable oratory skills. Realizing the jury was made up of 12 middle-aged married men who had lived most of their life in the Wild West, Pendergast made no apologies for the murder. Instead, in his closing arguments, he asked the jury to consider a higher law than the laws of California: the laws of human nature. His closing arguments concluded:

“I cannot ask you to send this man forth to family and home—he has none . . . . But I do ask you to send him forth free—let him take up the thread of his broken life, and resume that profession on which his genius had shed so much luster—the profession which is now his only love. Let him go forth into the green fields, by the bright waters, through the beautiful valleys, and up and down the swelling coast, and in the active work of the magic of his art, he may gain ‘surcease of sorrow’ and pass on to his allotted end in comparative peace.”

It was reported that those in the courtroom gave a standing ovation at the end of Pendergast’s speech, and that many in attendance openly wept.

The judge then instructed the jury that Muybridge could only be found either guilty, or innocent by reason of insanity. He then reminded them that Muybridge himself had said he was not insane. The jury promptly returned a verdict of not guilty, because it was a justified killing,  a verdict never used since in California (I’m told that the closely related ‘he needed killin’ verdict is used with some frequency in Texas, however).

Muybridge left the country almost immediately, photographing Central America for a steamship line that wanted to publicize their destination. He and Flora had a contentious legal battle over whether she should receive alimony in their divorce, which ended when she died suddenly at age 24. I’ve watched enough crime TV to think if a 24 year old dies suddenly from unknown causes while divorcing a man who works every day with toxic chemicals . . . but apparently no one else thought it odd.

Although he didn’t realize it at the time, during the Central American trip Muybridge would make nearly his last, and possibly his best, landscape work. Even by today’s standards, his signature cloudy skies are still awesome.

How Horses Moved, Part 2

When Muybridge returned from Central America, Stanford wanted him to improve on the photographs of moving horses he’d done in 1873.  This time he wanted a series of photographs, taken sequentially; every few feet as the horses ran buy.

Muybridge helped design the track where the photographs would be made, using lime to whiten the track itself; having a large, whitewashed wall the horses would run in front of; and using markers to show the distance travelled with each photograph. He experimented with his chemicals, creating an ammonia-based developer that would work on images with minimal exposures. He modified stereo cameras so that two lenses exposed each plate, doubling the amount of light for each shot.

With help from Stanford’s engineers, he devised a mechanical shutter using two pieces of wood tripped by a string the horse broke as it ran past. Unfortunately, the horses, being suspicious creatures with excellent eyesight, would often come to a complete stop at the first string. When they did finally get a horse to run through the strings, they were as likely to pull the expensive cameras over as to trip the mechanical shutters.

Muybridge and another of Stanford’s engineers, John Isaacs, developed electro-magnetic shutters. Finally, in 1877 and 1878, Muybridge was able to obtain a series of exposures of Stanford’s horse ‘Sallie Gardner’ at full gallop. They arranged demonstrations for local reporters who watched Stanford expose and develop the images, making sure this time there were no questions about the reality of their photographs.

Today, it’s hard for us to understand the impact these images had. They demonstrated something that had never been seen before, a still image of a rapidly moving creature. The first images taken from a microscope or telescope may have come close, but those didn’t show something people saw every day the way Muybridge’s photographs did. The results were reported in papers around the world, in Scientific American, and in La Nature, the French journal of science.

For the first time, photography was being used to advance and document scientific research. To complete the circle,  Étienne-Jules Marey’s wrote to Muybridge and Stanford, congratulating them and making suggestions for further work. (Marey himself would later contribute several inventions to stop-motion photography.)

Muybridge took the work a step further, beginning stop-motion photographs of other animals and people. He also developed a slightly different technique using multiple cameras to photograph the subject form various angles in a circle. He called these fore shortenings, but we know them as freeze-motion shots or the ‘Matrix effect’.

He also invented what he called a zoopraxiscope, which placed a series of images on the outside of a glass disk that was then spun in front of a projecting magic lantern. The result was a repeating clip of a second or two’s length, showing the animal’s actual motion.

He demonstrated this device to Thomas Edison in 1888, which some said inspired Edison to invent the Kinetoscope, the earliest motion picture device. That may or may not be, but Edison filed his first ‘caveat,’ or intention to patent a motion picture device, soon after he saw Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope. And just to close the circle once again, Mayer, who started all of this with his suggestion of stop-motion photography, had himself invented a ‘chronographic gun,’ capable of taking twelve frames per second. Edison visited Mayer in 1889, and immediately after returning to the U. S. filed another ‘caveat’ for a motion picture camera.

Coincidence? Probably not. But Karma’s a bitch and Edison forgot to, or didn’t think to, file patents in other countries. This allowed the Lumiere brothers and others to perfect motion picture projection and refine motion picture cameras in Europe.

The Great Falling Out

Muybridge began a lecture tour in 1880 that took him through the U. S. and Europe. In 1882, while lecturing in London and discussing obtaining long-term support from the Royal Society, his career hit another bump. Stanford and D. J. Stillman published “The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography.” The book contained drawings of the photographs Muybridge had taken, but gave him absolutely no credit. Stanford considered Muybridge a hired technician and since he had not used the actual photographs saw no reason to include him as an author.

The effect on Muybridge’s career was profound. The Royal Society withdrew their offer, fearing that Muybridge had not really done the work he claimed. Muybridge sued both Stanford and the publisher. In Muybridge fashion, however, he lost both lawsuits largely because he claimed credit for everything to do with the project and lost credibility. He never forgave Stanford, though, and made references to him in lectures and publications for years.

Muybridge landed on his feet, however, taking a position at the University of Pennsylvania who set up a lab for him to continue his work on scientific photography of animals and humans in motion. They set up a committee of 9 Academics to oversee the work and make certain it remained scientific, but also realized the work would aid artists in their drawings and paintings.

Muybridge was prolific. He photographed birds in flight and almost every available animal moving at different gaits. Photographs of humans demonstrated the gaits of various diseases for medical training, athletes in motion, and hundreds of nude models in various movements. In total he made almost 100,000 images that appeared in a number of books.

The first, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, was published in 11 volumes containing 20,000 images. It instantly became a classic reference for artists and scientists alike.

Perhaps the best demonstration of how much Muybridge was respected is shown by the fact that he made several thousand photographs of nude models while at Pennsylvania and not a word was said. One of the committee members overseeing his work was fired for having a single nude model pose in his art class.

The Later Years

Muybridge began a second successful lecture tour in 1886. It lasted until 1893 when he opened a Zoopraxographical Hall at the Chicago World’s Exposition. This last was not a financial success and he moved back to his childhood home, Kingston on the Thames, England permanently in 1894. While there, he published two more books: Animals in Motion and The Human Figure in Motion. He died in 1904 and in one last bit of irony for the man who changed his name so often, the name on his tombstone is Maybridge, not Muybridge.

REFERENCES:

Brian Clegg: The Man Who Stopped Time. The Illuminating Story of Eadweard Muybridge – Pioneer Photographer, Father of the Motion Picture, Murderer. Joseph Henry Press, 2007.

Gordon Hendricks: Eadweard Muybridge, the Father of the Motion Picture. Secker and Warburg, 1975.

Miles, Walter: The Stanford-Muybridge Motion Pictures of 1878-1879. Address to the Semi-Centennial Celebration of the Stanford Motion Picture Institute. May 8, 1929.

Soinit, Rebecca: River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. Penguin Books, 2004.

Stern, Keith: Freezing Time: The Autobiography of Eadward Muybridge. Shoreham House Publishers, 2011. NOTE: This is a historical novel, not an actual autobiography. But it is a fun read.

Leslie, Mitchell: The Man Who Stopped Time. Stanford Magazine, 2001.

More Muybridge:

Stephen Herbert’s page links to dozens of fascinating links concerning Muybridge.

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”  – Mark Twain

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
― Groucho Marx

My overview of American government goes generally like this:

1. Something happens.
2. The government passes some laws in response to it, adds on a few pork projects, and raises taxes to pay for the laws and the pork.
3. The laws (or pork) cause an entirely new problem.
4. Repeat.

The usual outcome of this cycle is that every year we have more laws and higher taxes. But every so often, some accidental side effect occurs and something awesomely good happens. So it was during the alphabet-soup days of New Deal government during the Great Depression. The accidental side effect was the Golden Age of American Photography. How it happened is rather interesting.

Farmers, the Great Depression, and the New Deal

Even before the Crash of 1929, farmers in America were struggling. American farmers produced so much food during the 1920s that prices dropped so low that they could barely support themselves. Many farmers responded by increasing production even more, trying to make up for narrower margins with higher quantities.

Once the Great Depression had begun, prices dropped so low that it often wasn’t worth the cost of transporting the crops to market. In some areas farmers burned corn instead of wood or coal in their stoves. In 1933, the American government responded by passing the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to NOT grow crops. The idea was that having fewer crops grown would decrease supply and raise prices, supporting agriculture. It also arranged low interest loans for farmers to buy equipment like tractors, increasing their efficiency.

It worked as well as most government interventions. Many landowners accepted government payouts instead of planting. What hadn’t occurred to the government was that most of the actual farming was done by tenant farmers. Since the landowner was getting paid to not farm, he had no use for the tenants. Even if he continued to farm, the landowner could take advantage of the new loan programs and buy a tractor that could replace several tenant farmers who plowed with their mules.

Now thousands of tenant farmers were homeless. The Government responded, as governments do, by creating the Resettlement Administration with the goal of moving 650,000 people to new farms. The program was controversial and poorly funded. All it accomplished was building 95 camps that provided housing to about 75,000 migrant farm workers, mostly in California. To top things off, in 1936, the Supreme Court decided the Agricultural Adjustment Act was unconstitutional.

Presented with this new problem, Congress responded by creating the Farm Security Administration, which took over for both the Agricultural Adjustment and Resettlement Administrations. This program was no more popular than its predecessors at first, and seen by many as an effort to bring Socialism to American agriculture.

Politicians will be politicians, though, and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and a lot of Democratic Congressmen) was up for reelection. Bureaucrats will be bureaucrats and protect their agencies and jobs.  So the FSA opened an Information Division to ‘educate’ the public about all the good it was doing. The resulting propaganda blitz was more successful than they could have hoped.

Stryker’s Plan

Rexford Tugwell, the head of the Resettlement and Farm Security Administration, hired an ex-student, Roy Stryker to “to enhance the public’s perception of the federal aid programs for the destitute.” He was to show American voters that the Depression was everywhere, that government intervention on a national level was the only way to deal with it, and that government programs were working.

In the 1930′s, there was no internet or television. What people saw came mostly from pictures in magazines and newspapers. This was the era when glossy-photo magazines became widespread. Fortune, Look, and Life all started as photojournalism magazines in the 1930s.

Stryker’s plan was simple and effective. He knew that photographers were largely out of work because of the Depression, since newspapers and magazines had cut back staffs and people couldn’t afford either portraits or artistic photographs.

Stryker hired a number of excellent photographers on fairly simple terms. He gave them great cameras, unlimited supplies of film or plates, a small expense allowance, and some degree of artistic freedom. The photographers jumped at the chance, partly because there were so few opportunities available, partly because the work was interesting, and partly because many of them found it attractive politically.

Stryker would assign a photographer an area of the country and a general ‘shoot list’ documenting some aspect of American life in that region. He sent his photographers books and background materials before each assignment, outlined the projects in general, but then let the photographers work as they thought best.

Photographers sent all of their images to the FSA for processing. They also gave all rights to the FSA, although they could keep copies of prints or negatives for themselves. The majority of the time Stryker controlled the images totally — the negatives were sent to the central office for development and Stryker’s staff chose which images were circulated.

Stryker approached various newspapers and magazines and offered them photographic essays at absolutely no cost. Most of them, having cut back their photography departments in the Depression, were happy to use free FSA photos, of which almost 270,000 were taken.

There were some exceptions where Stryker directed his photographers to work directly with regional newspapers. Dorothea Lange, for example, developed her Migrant Mother images and sent them directly to local California newspapers. That explains why the local California papers showed this photograph . . .

. . . while the rest of the country (and we today) are used to seeing this image.

In a way, the project actually went viral, although they didn’t use such terms back then. Fortune, at least, sent its own teams of photographers and journalists on similar photographic missions.

The Photographers

The list of FSA Photographers is basically a Who’s Who of American photographers. Some, like Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans were well known before their work for FSA. Others, like Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, Marion Post-Wolcott, Russell Lee, and Jack Delano largely got their start through the FSA. As a group, they are some of the most influential photographers in the 20th Century.

These photographers, and others who followed them, defined the genre of documentary photography. Their images defined a critical time in history and explored techniques that guided photography for a generation. They also demonstrated just how powerfully photography could influence society.

For the first time, northeastern city dwellers actually saw the living conditions of poor tenant farmers and migrant workers.  People on the West Coast saw that those on the East Coast were faring no better than they.

How Did That Work Out for You, Roy?

Stryker, a man with a mission, tried to control his photographers – but given the group he was working with, that was doomed to total failure. Walker Evans, for example, would accept an assignment, go to that general area, and then photograph whatever he found appealing, whether it had anything to do with the assignment or not.

Stryker was quite a liberal for the time, hiring several female photographers and taking the unheard of (at the time) step of hiring a black photographer (Gordon Parks). It seems he assumed they would all be grateful at the opportunity and do whatever he told them. That didn’t quite work out.

Marion Post Wolcott may have provided some of the best images of the FSA photographers, but she apparently accounted for most of Stryker’s gray hair. In one letter to Post-Wolcott, it appears he might not have been quite as liberal as he seemed, telling her, “Slacks aren’t part of your attire. You’re a woman and a woman should never dress like a man.” and “You can’t depend on the wiles of femininity in the wilds of the South” (correspondence January 13th, 1939). I would love to have seen his face when she wrote back, “Skirts do not have pockets and I’m sure you’ll agree it would be inappropriate for me to keep film rolls and filters stuffed in my blouse between my titties.”

Gordon Parks (later the director of the 1970′s Shaft movies), who moved to Washington, D. C. from Seattle and Chicago, said later “I experienced a kind of bigotry and discrimination here that I never expected to experience.” He met cleaning woman Ella Watson and created his photograph “American Gothic, 1942″ as a response to the open prejudice he experienced. To his credit, Stryker simply said, “that picture could get us all fired” but didn’t destroy the image.

Marion Post Wolcott, in one correspondence, called her assignments “FSA cheesecake.” Stryker eventually said ”most of what the photographers have to do to stay on the payroll was routine stuff showing what a good job the agencies were doing out in the field. They are free to spend a day here, a day there, to get other images.”  Not surprising, it was the ‘other images’ that often were the best, but probably gave our boy Roy an ulcer or three.

Post-Wolcott and others spent significant amounts of time documenting things the administration didn’t particularly wish documented, especially racial inequality and the squalid living conditions of rural African Americans.

Margaret Bourke-White’s picture of African Americans waiting in a breadline under a billboard featuring a white family in their new car certainly caused some distress back in Washington —  FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein had designed the billboard.

In the long run, Dorothea Lange caused probably the biggest stir. In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. At the outbreak of World War II she gave up her fellowship to document the internment of Japanese Americans in relocation camps. The Army impounded and classified all of her images, most of which weren’t released until 40 years later. (They have recently been published in book form.)

The Spin-Off Books

There was similar work being done outside of the FSA. Novelist Erskine Caldwell wrote controversial novels of the Old South. His wife, Margaret Bourke White, was a premier photographer of the day, the first staff photographer for Fortune Magazine. The two travelled through the South creating the book You Have Seen Their Faces featuring her photographs and his captions. The book, published in 1937, was widely read and critically acclaimed. Later, when it was found that Caldwell and Bourke-White had made up the photograph’s captions, which appeared to be factual, the book was discredited to some degree.

In one of the more bizarre stories of depression-era photography, Fortune Magazine writer James Agee talked the magazine into letting him spend several weeks in rural Alabama, supposedly reporting on the recovery of cotton farming. He also talked them into hiring photographer Walker Evans to take the photographs. Evans was at the time an FSA photographer. It is unclear if he was on loan to Fortune, between assignments, or most likely double-dipping employment. In any case the photos taken ended up in the Library of Congress archives.

Agee was very liberal (he later described himself as “a great deal more a communist than not”) and apparently hated his job at Fortune. He wrote the article far longer than the magazine could possibly publish and from a subversive point of view he knew they would not publish. As he expected, the magazine killed the story.  He and Evans published it in book form (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) in 1941, but it was not immediately popular since it was felt to be a knock-off of You Have Seen Their Faces. It was republished in 1960, and several times since, and to this day is considered one of the greatest photo documentary works ever made.

The Outcome

Despite the amazing work done by the FSA photographers, the agency itself remained constantly controversial. In 1943, Congress demanded it be disbanded and its services reorganized into existing bureaucracies. Stryker, fearing that enemies of his agency would destroy all of the photographs, donated 107,000 negatives to the Library of Congress before the agency disbanded. So in the sense of its original purpose, to show the Agency was doing great work, the project failed.

Stryker, interestingly enough, was immediately hired by Standard Oil Company to undertake a similar project to repair their tarnished reputation. He used several of his FSA photographers in this work, collecting 67,000 images over 8 years.

The subjects of the photographs didn’t benefit directly. After Lange’s Migrant Mother images appeared in California papers, tons of food were delivered to the migrant camp. Florence Owens Thompson, the woman pictured in Migrant Mother, had already moved to a new camp, trying to find work. The subjects of Evans and Agee’s book never benefitted (and their offspring remained bitter about their ‘exploitation’ for many years).

In fact, generally the subjects of the photographs were not impressed by either the photographer’s or government’s efforts on their behalf.

 ”There was plenty of people who couldn’t get a living out of a farm long before the Government heard about it.”  

Erskine Caldwell: You Have Seen Their Faces. 1937.

They simply endured and persevered, generally with dignity and pride.

The photographers, however, benefitted greatly. Dorothea Lange became the first fine art photographer on the faculty of the California School of Fine Art. Gordon Parks’ career can’t be covered in a few sentences: he was remarkably successful as a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and composer. Walker Evans became a writer for Time magazine and a faculty member at Yale University School of Fine Art. Arthur Rothstein was director of photography for Look magazine. I could go on for quite a while: the FSA photographers were among the most successful American photographers of the 20th Century.

Whether or not you think the program made a social difference probably depends more on your current politics than anything else. But what it did provide was amazing documentation of what life was like during the Great Depression. Anyone who feels sorry for themselves in the current hard economic times just has to look at those images for a while to feel perhaps things aren’t so bad  today.

Further Reading

Author’s note: If you’re interested in any of these, I strongly urge buying the actual book. The images don’t translate well to electronic readers, even my beloved iPad.

1. Agee, A and Evans, W: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Houghton Mifflin, 1939.  The text is overlong and rather syrupy. The images are amazing, disturbing, and inspiring. You can find inexpensive used copies everywhere. 
2. Caldwell, E and Bourke-White, M: You Have Seen Their Faces. Brown Thrasher Books, 1995. The text is really good, the images even better. But realize the text is fiction. 
3. Goldberg, V: Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography. Addison-Wesley, 1987. It’s a long book. I used it as a reference – I can’t read it cover-to-cover.
4. Gordon, L and Okihiro, G: Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment. W. W. Norton, NY, 2006. The photographs aren’t as artistic or moving as some of her other work. But it is amazingly educational about a chapter in American history they didn’t teach me (or you) in school. 
5. Gordon, Linda: Dorothea Lange: A Life Without Limits. W. W. Norton, NY, 2009. Not quite as long as Bourke-White’s biography, rather more interesting. Few pictures, so this one is a good Kindle read. 
6. Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/background.html  History of the Farm Security Administration.
7. http://www.oberlin.edu/library/papers/honorshistory/2001-Gorman/FSA/FSAhistory/fsahist3.html
8. Nau, T: Walker Evans. Photographer of America. Roaring Book Press. Short, perhaps superficial text, but filled with amazing photography. 

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

October 2012

It’s been a long time since I did a photography history article. I generally prefer the early days of photography. People just were, I don’t know, more back then. There was more lying, backstabbing, more drama, and more originality. You name it; they did more of it.

In my various readings, which I do far too much of, I learned a bit about Samuel Morse and became fascinated. This guy had more careers than I have. (Hey, some of those careers I wanted to leave. Don’t be tacky.) At various times he was a preacher, a painter, a professor, an inventor, a photographer, and a politician.

But when I looked a little deeper, I found he wasn’t a Renaissance-type Polymath as I had assumed. Morse was an argumentative, whining man who failed at one career after another, fought with and sued (or was sued by) by virtually every associate he ever had, and played the poor-pitiful-me victim card at every turn. He succeeded at almost everything he did for a while, then failed miserably and left to do something else.

He is recognized as the inventor of the telegraph, which he really wasn’t, and the originator of Morse code, which he probably was. On one of his many career side-trips he also had a large role in bringing photography to the U. S. It is largely because of Morse that American photography took a leading role in the mid-1800s. That wasn’t really his intention, though. He spent far more time and energy telling everyone he had done it, than he actually spent in doing it.

He was an ugly man, as my sainted mother would say in her best Steel Magnolia voice. In the South ugly doesn’t refer so much to physical appearance as it does to personality. When I told the story of Petzval and Voigtlander it was a bit tragic; a great inventor robbed of his just rewards by a sneaky businessman. That happened to Morse, too, but he was his own worst enemy.

Morse’s Origins

Morse probably came by his rather opinionated personality rather naturally. He was born in 1791, the eldest son of Jedidiah Morse. As you would expect, with a name like Jedidiah, papa Morse was a fire breathing, New England Congregationalist Minister. He also wrote most of the Geography books that originated in America in the decades around 1800, and was widely known as ‘the Father of American Geography’.

Jedidiah followed the ‘Often wrong, never in doubt’ school of thinking with a nice dash of paranoia thrown in. He spent most of his time fighting Unitarianism, Popery, Freemasonry, and anything else he considered a threat to America. He knew most of the founding fathers of America, idolizing Washington but despising Adams and Jefferson as Jacobinists.

Samuel Morse spent most of his youth at various boarding schools (not unusual in the day) and eventually attended Yale College. Yale was largely known for two things: training Puritanical clergy (his parent’s hope for Samuel) and experimentation in newfangled sciences like electricity. In those days, Yale was largely a reaction to the more liberal Harvard College, with Yale’s Puritan roots showing in rules against ‘card playing, tavern going, and acts of disobedience to college authorities’.

Just like colleges today, the rules seemed put in place to mostly reassure the parents paying tuition. Morse played cards, hung out at the local tavern, went on ‘shooting parties’ with his classmates, and was at first an indifferent student. Like most college students, his letters home begged for more money; his parent’s responses were ‘not with those grades, Sammy’. Morse became a better student; his parents forked over more cash.

After putting his parents in debt obtaining his degree, Samuel did what children have done after graduation forever: he decided he really didn’t like the field his degree prepared him for. He wanted to be a painter (like on canvas, not like on houses). He had been a self-taught painter for some time and thought it would be a marvelous idea if he went to England to study painting for three years with two prominent American painters of the day, Washington Alliston and Benjamin West.

It somehow never occurred to Samuel that there was a reason Benjamin West, the greatest early American painter, lived in London and made his living painting pictures of King George and Horatio Nelson — there was no market for fine art in America at the time. Jedidiah was aware of this and refused Samuel’s request to study in England, setting him up in a nice apprenticeship with a book publisher.

Morse dutifully followed his father’s directions and took the job his father arranged at a Boston publisher. He proceeded to write home weekly that he was completely miserable, had no reason to live, but he would die happily knowing he had followed his family’s wishes. After some months of this Jedidiah was willing to pay any price to get Samuel out of his hair, so off to study art in England he went.

 The Painting Years

Morse was quite successful in his art studies, producing at least one critically acclaimed painting, Dying Hercules. He also managed to gain admittance to the Royal Academy in 1811, which probably had the added benefits of driving his Anglophobic father completely insane. Remember, the war of 1812 was right around the corner and so the U. S. and Britain weren’t exactly best friends at the time.

Morse returned to America in 1815 and did quite well as a painter — for a while. He was commissioned to paint portraits of John Adams, James Monroe, and the Marquis de Lafayette, among others. But commissions dried up as the American economy soured. For a decade Morse struggled financially. He moved constantly, taught students in Charleston and New York, and took commissions where he could get them.

He married, but his wife and children lived with his parents or other relatives while he worked to establish himself. However, even when Morse was doing well (at one time he had a large house in New York City and was regularly sending money home) he never sent for his family. When his wife died suddenly in 1825, Morse sent the children to live with various relatives and rarely visited them.

He was crushed that he was turned down to paint one of four scenes for the new United States Capital building. Instead, he painted a huge scene of the capital itself, hoping to draw large crowds to its exhibition, but this failed financially.

Morse's House of Representatives

In 1829 he decided he needed further study in Europe. He took commissions to paint copies of various famous paintings and left to spend the next three years in Italy and France. Toward the end of his stay he spent several months painting his masterpiece, The Gallery of the Louvre, expecting to sell it for a large sum when he returned to America. As usual, Morse was disappointed. The exhibition of the painting drew meager crowds and he sold it eventually for $1500.

The Gallery of the Louvre. The girl pictured is the daughter of James Fennimore Cooper who befriended Morse in Paris, and on whom Morse developed something of a crush.

The Early Telegraph Years

Morse returned to America on board the sailing ship Sully in 1832. During the voyage he had lengthy discussions with Dr. Thomas Jackson regarding the ability of electricity to pass a current instantaneously through a wire over great distances. After arriving back in America he began to work on a device using batteries and copper wire that would transmit a signal over distances.

Having no real scientific education, Morse spent a lot of time with Professor Leonard Gale who helped him develop a power source and the electromagnetic relays that let the system work over long distances. Having no practical engineering background, nor any money, he partnered with Alfred Vail, whose family owned a large machine shop and provided both funds and equipment to develop Morse’s ideas.

Morse and Vail exhibited a working device in 1838. Rather than using the series of dots and dashes that eventually became Morse code, they sent a series of numbers. The numbers each correlated to a word in a large dictionary. The number 29 might mean ‘horse’ while 162 might be ‘rider’, etc. (Morse felt selling the dictionary would be a major profit for his new invention.)

Finding no one in America was interested in purchasing his invention, Morse travelled back to Europe hoping to sell it there. Once again he was unsuccessful. Great Britain already had a working (in a limited way), patented telegraph system developed by Sir William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. The system wasn’t nearly as good as the Morse system, which required just a single wire and was much simpler. On the other hand, it was Britain and Cooke and Wheatstone were British.

A similar reception awaited in Europe where the Gauss and Weber had developed a telegraph system that Carl Steinheil had deployed in Munich. Again, the system was more complex than Morse’s, but the Germans weren’t interested in paying Morse when they already had a system in place, even though it was a limited system.

As an aside (can you believe I got this far without an aside?) in 1839 Steinheil became the first German to use Daguerre’s newfangled camera system. Within a few months he had developed a method to create a negative image and multiple positive prints on paper, similar to Talbot’s photographs. In the 1850s he founded the Steinhill optical works and his son, Hugo, developed some of the most important camera lenses of the 1800s.

Apparently the closest Morse came to selling his system while in Europe was to Russia who found it attractive largely because it wasn’t British or German. But the Czars spent all their money on Faberge Eggs and such in those days, and never got around to purchasing the telegraph.

The French also took a look but they already had a high tech system in place: they had built a series of small towers a few miles apart, each of which had moveable wooden arms on top. The arms were controlled by ropes, sending a series of semaphore signals. The French felt this was far more reliable than some signal traveling through electrical wires. They sort of glossed over things like darkness, fog, rain, and wind; all of which made their system shut down.

Morse returned to America broke and unsuccessful. But his trip to Europe wasn’t entirely useless.

Photography

While in France in 1838, the American Ambassador arranged a meeting with a French inventor and showman, Louis Daguerre. Daguerre treated Morse to a show at his Diorama, demonstrated his new camera, and showed a number of photographs, which impressed Morse greatly. Morse returned the favor by demonstrating the telegraph to Daguerre. (It was during this demonstration that Daguerre’s Diorama Theater burnt down, so apparently Morse’s bad financial luck spread to people around him.)

Daguerre agreed to furnish Morse with all of the documentation for his process as soon as the French Government agreed to buy the photographic invention. Morse received his copy of Daguerre’s book in the summer of 1839 and built his own Daguerreotype camera. Morse, having no money as usual, talked his two brothers into removing the roof of their 6 story newspaper building and replacing it with a skylight, allowing him to have the first photography studio in America.

Morse partnered with Dr. John Draper, a Professor of Chemistry at New York University. Draper’s chemical background allowed him to make improvements to Daguerre’s development process. By 1840 he had shortened exposure times enough to take actual portraits, something Daguerre had felt could never be accomplished. He was also the first man to photograph the moon and the first American to take photographs through a microscope.

Morse and Draper also opened a daguerreian studio and classroom in 1840, assisted by Samuel Broadbent. While it seems Morse did not have great success in his portrait business, he took students and taught them the processes involved for a fee of $25 to $50. He made a reasonable living this way for several years.

In addition to Broadbent, Morse trained Mathew Brady, Albert Sands Southworth, Edward Anthony, and Jeremiah Gurney. These men went on to become America’s foremost early photographers.

Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs were the origin of Photojournalism. It is Brady’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln that provide the images on the Penny and $5 bill. Brady made almost every surviving photograph of American Civil War generals, both Union and Confederate.

Broadbent opened the first photographic studios in Philadelphia and Atlanta. Southworth did the same in Boston where he additionally was the photographer for the Massachusett’s General Hospital, recording operating room scenes including the first surgeries under anesthesia.

Anthony became the first to use photographs as legal evidence, submitting landscapes of the boundary between the U. S. and Canada to demonstrate landmarks. He later founded the E. & H. T. Anthony & Company, which was the largest distributor of photography equipment in the U. S. until Kodak changed the market. Oddly enough, Matthew Brady spent so much money making his Civil War photographs that his plates all became the property of E & H. T. Anthony & Co. when he defaulted on payment for his photographic supplies.

Gurney was probably the best-known American portrait photographer of the 1850s and 60s. He was one of the first American photographers to exhibit in Britain and Europe. It was his exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1853 that led magazines of the day to state, “It is generally understood that the best daguerreotypes are produced in the United States”.

Like so many of his occupations, Morse was not particularly successful in his own photography business and he closed it within a few years, never to photograph again. His students, though, became the best-known American photographers of the Daguerreotype era and went on to train most of the American photographers of the next generation. Morse, therefore, has a legitimate claim to being the father of American photography.

Like his own children, though, he was an absentee father, having left the field shortly after it’s birth. And like much of his activities, Morse spent more time belittling the contributions of others and emphasizing his own than was appropriate.

He conveniently forgot the contributions of Dr. Draper, and in later life stated he taught Draper, rather than properly crediting him as a co-investigator. Draper’s doctorate in chemistry makes it unlikely that Morse, as he later claimed, made most of the advances in the development process. Indeed, Morse was reminded that he himself took instruction from François  Gouraud, an associate of Daguerre who came to America about the same time Morse began his photography experiments. When this was pointed out to him, he replied in print that he had spent considerable time unlearning what Gouraud wrongly taught.

The Rest of the Story

In 1843 Morse and his associates obtained a $30,000 grant from the U. S. Congress to create a telegraph line from Washington, D. C. to Baltimore, MD. It was hugely successful. Over the following years, the telegraph became perhaps the most important invention of the 1800s. Communication, which had been limited to the speed of a train or sailing ship, became almost instantaneous. Huge corporations, like Western Union and the Associated Press developed directly as a result of the new technology.

While Morse was successful, it seems unlikely he was ever happy. He was embroiled in dozens of lawsuits with various business partners and competitors for the remainder of his lifetime. While he became financially successful, it was largely because he received 5,000 shares of the Western Union Company when it incorporated. He got very little money directly from the telegraph.

In Europe, the patents of Wheatstone, Cooke and others prevented him from making any income from his now worldwide telegraph system, although several European countries banded together to give him some small payments in gratitude for his invention. He was also given honors equivalent to Knighthoods by several countries, including Denmark and Turkey. While he was immensely proud of this, it caused him problems back in the United States because accepting such honors should have meant giving up his U. S. citizenship.

Morse also appears to have forgotten those who helped him. He wrote dozens of letters-to-the-editor, depositions, and even books defending himself from charges that Vail, Professor Gale, Dr. Jackson, and numerous others were the true inventors of the Morse telegraph. Rather than graciously offering a bit of credit that was due, he generally claimed all the ideas were his in entirety.

In U. S. court cases, he was largely, but not entirely, successful in defending his patents. Vail, however, received a significant portion of the money Morse made from his inventions. He is also arguably credited with changing Morse code from the ‘word associated with a number’ method used originally to the Morse alphabet code that was eventually adopted for general use. It was also Vail who developed the telegraph key and Gale who created the repeater system that made long-distance transmission possible.

Some of this fighting was unavoidable with such a landmark invention, of course. There were obviously fortunes to be made by those who owned the rights to the telegraph. Some of the fighting appears to have just been Morse’s nature. Long after his patents had run out and his financial success was assured, he continued to write long letters to various newspapers refuting anyone who claimed any shared credit for his invention.

Americans idolized Morse for years after the telegraph was introduced. From his position of fame, he became rather political and wrote at length against – well, basically everything that wasn’t Calvinist American. He ran for office on anti-Catholic, anti-European, and anti-abolitionist platforms (1,2). After being soundly defeated (he received 759 votes when running for the Mayor of New York) he continued to write numerous political articles.

During the American Civil War he wrote long diatribes attempting to show that the Bible was pro-slavery and organized groups to oppose Lincoln whom he blamed for the Civil War. This might have been better received had he lived in the Confederate States. In his homes of New York and New England, though, it brought public opinion of him to new lows.

Morse returned to Europe for most of the last years of his life, largely because he felt more comfortable there. He finally returned home to New York in 1870. During his last years he was extremely philanthropic, making large donations to Churches and educational institutes.

Public opinion of Morse had largely rebounded by that time and on June 10th, 1871 a large celebration of his life took place. It began with the unveiling of a statue of him in Central Park, and ended in a large auditorium where Morse keyed out his last message in Morse code.

Morse died a few months later at age 81. At the time of his death he was writing a last rebuttal to an article written by the curator of the Smithsonian museum that claimed that Vail and Gale, not he, were the true inventors of the telegraph.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

October, 2012

References:

Bellis, Mary (2009). “Timeline: Biography of Samuel Morse 1791 – 1872″. The New York Times Company.

http://www.fullbooks.com/Samuel-F-B-Morse-His-Letters-and-Journalsx516.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20061212073521/http://www.morsehistoricsite.org/history/morse.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Morse

http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventors/a/samuel_morse.htm

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Samuel-Morses-Reversal-of-Fortune.html

Mabee, Carleton. The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. Morse. Rev. ed. Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 2000.
Samuel F. B. Morse Biography – life, parents, death, history, wife, mother, son, information, born, college, time http://www.notablebiographies.com/Mo-Ni/Morse-Samuel-F-B.html#b#ixzz28FHWCgxT

Silverman, Kenneth: Lightning Man: The Accursed Life Of Samuel F.B. Morse. Da Capo Press, 2004.

The First Images

The very first cameras, of course, were Daguerrotypes and the images they made were positives on silver plates coated with Iodine and developed using fumes from Mercury. You can probably already tell this had a few drawbacks. Positive images can’t be reproduced so one picture was one picture — if you wanted a copy for Aunt Bessie  you had to take another picture. Silver is silver, so each picture was rather pricey (up to a month’s pay for a working man). I guess inhaling mercury fumes in the darkroom all day didn’t exactly lead to a lot of healthy old photographers walking around either.

Not long after that, the albumin process was developed. This let photographers make negative images on glass plates coated with albumen. Glass is a lot cheaper than silver, which helped make photographs affordable. Since the images were negatives you could make as many prints as you might like from a single photograph, so things like picture books came into being. Images on glass could be projected in ‘magic lanterns’ so risque images of  ladies ankles and such could be projected at the gentleman’s clubs of the day. So the albumen process made it possible for photographers to achieve the same goals they have today: getting published in book form and getting pretty girls to pose partially undressed.

Albumin had it’s drawbacks, though. The process was difficult and time consuming, requiring the plates to be prepared fresh just before each photographic shot. Carrying around a few hundred glass plates got rather heavy, and glass breaks. And the major source of albumen, in case you don’t know, is from egg whites. Photography became so popular that it actually led to egg shortages. As many as 1,000,000 eggs a year were used for photography in England alone.

Cellulose, Nitrocellulose, and Collodion

Oddly enough, the same year that Daguerre introduced the camera (1838) another Frenchman, Anselme Payen, discovered that a chemical called cellulose was the major structural component of most plants. Everything from cotton to wood was largely cellulose, in slightly different variations. Other chemists quickly found out that cellulose was a huge molecule, but made up of a small molecule (glucose) linked over-and-over into long chains.

Chemical diagram of two glucose molecules linked together, like they are in cellulose. A single cellulose molecule is made up of from 50 to many hundred glucose molecules.

I promise not to go all chemical formula on you in this article, but it’s easier to show you a picture. The hexagon in the middle of each glucose molecule is a ring of carbon atoms, and you can see there are various atoms (Oxygen and Hydrogen) sticking out from the ring. The reason chemists were all pumped about this was if you made a chemical change to cellulose, you’d be making that change to hundreds of atoms that were linked together. Cellulose is available in everything from wood to cotton, so if  you made some useful new chemical from it, you’d be able to get your starting supplies very cheaply. That’s always a good thing.

Schonbein and Exploding Cotton

Frederich Schonbein was a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Basel. He was also a complete chemistry geek. Working in the lab at the University all day wasn’t enough for Frederich, he liked to do some experimenting at home after dinner and on the weekends. Frederich’s wife had gotten pretty tired of this and forbidden him to do any more chemistry experiments at the house. But wive’s will be wive’s and go visit their sisters, and men will be men and use such opportunities to do what they are forbidden to do.

Frederich decided to take advantage of his afternoon home alone to play with Nitric Acid and some other fun things. Of course, given the karma debt this caused, he spilled the acid on the kitchen floor and grabbed his wife’s cotton apron to mop it up with. He hung the apron over the stove to dry, no doubt checking his watch to see how much time he had before the little lady got home. He needn’t have bothered: the apron exploded rather violently, blowing the windows out of the kitchen and causing various other damage.

History didn’t record the discussion Frederich and his wife had when she got home. But it does record that Frederich had accidentally discovered guncotton. The Nitric Acid had converted all of the Oxygen-hydrogen (OH) side chains to Nitrate side chains – the cellulose was now nitrocellulose (AKA Guncotton) which just loves to explode. I can assure you this is so – I first read about guncotton in college and my geek friends and I snuck into the Organic Chemistry lab to make some. In case you ever want to know, chemistry lab windows cost $145.55 each and if you blow some out you have to pay for them before you can graduate. (If you feel the need to repeat my actions, there’s a link in the references that tells you how to make your own guncotton. But remember, this is a first step to becoming a Darwin Award winner.)

Nitrocellulose, AKA guncotton

Frederich, being German, immediately realized that there would be big money selling his guncotton to the military: it was more powerful than gunpowder and didn’t leave huge clouds of smoke like gunpowder did. He immediately attracted some venture capital and built factories to manufacture guncotton. Unfortunately for Frederich and his investors, one by one all of the factories exploded and they went bankrupt. Guncotton wasn’t all that safe to work with.

Collodion

Schonbein had been right, though. There was a huge market for guncotton if it could be made safe (safe explosive is kind of an oxymoron, but you know what I mean). Chemists all over the world began experimenting with cellulose and nitrates. They did make it safer, but they also learned other things. For instance, guncotton will dissolve in a solution of ether and alcohol, making a thick, syrupy liquid called collodion. When exposed to air it quickly dries to a plastic-like coating (you may have used it in products like “liquid bandage” or “compound W”).

Frederick Scott Archer, courtesy Wikepedia Commons.

Collodion was pretty cool and all, but other than instant bandages and making shiny coatings on things it didn’t appear to have a lot of uses. However, In 1850, Frederich Scott Archer found that collodion made a superb substitute for the albumen being used to coat glass plates for photography. Light sensitive chemicals dissolved in it easily, it coated plates smoothly, cost less than albumen, and it didn’t spoil (albumen comes from eggs – you know what 3 day old eggs smell like?). Most importantly it let people go back to using eggs for their natural purpose — breakfast.

The importance of Archer’s discovery really can’t be exaggerated. It became the primary way photographs were made by the mid 1850s. The process was further improved by W. B. Bolton and B. J. Sayce in the 1860s, making it somewhat simpler and more consistent.

It wasn’t perfect, of course. The plates had to be made by the photographer within 10 minutes or so of the exposure. It was sensitive only to blue light, so warm colors appear dark and cool colors light, so a person dressed in bright red or yellow would appear to be wearing dark clothes. Because clouds and sky are both shades of blue, clouds rarely are seen in collodion process images. Oh, I almost forgot — collodion is nitrocellulose (guncotton) suspended in ether and alcohol, so the odd fire or explosion did occur when preparing photographic plates.

A Photographer Discovers Synthetic Cloth

Toward the end of the collodion era, a French photographer, Hilaire de Chardonnet, spilled some of his collodion. When he cleaned up the partially dried puddle he noticed that the collodion pulled away in long, sticky threads. They reminded him of the threads of silkworms which he had seen as a student.

Hilaire de Chardonnet

Chardonnet tried forcing collodion through small holes drilled in a metal plate and found it made nice shiny threads that could be woven into cloth. He patented the process in 1885, showed his “Chardonnet silk” at the Paris exposition of 1889 to great acclaim, and opened factories to produce his marvelous new material in 1891.

Chardonnet Silk was very popular. For about a year. But Chardonnet forgot what we just talked about: collodion is largely nitrocellulose and so was the cloth he made from it. In one known incident a gentleman accidentally flicked a cigar ash on the dress of his dancing partner. Her entire gown disappeared in a blinding flash of light and heat, leaving them both with flashburns and the lady displaying more of her charms than she had intended.

Chardonnet was able to make changes to his chemical process (the fact that his original factory burned down in another nitrocellulose fire probably made it easier to make changes). By that time, however, other chemists had tried his “push a thick sticky substance through small holes to create threads” idea with other chemicals. One company found that viscose, which was created from the cellulose of wood chips, would make artificial threads just like collodion would, but with the advantage of not exploding. Viscose could not only be forced through small holes to make threads, it could be forced through thin slits to make sheets. The American Viscose Company and the Fibersilk Company produced both the cloth (which we call Rayon) and the sheets (Cellophane). The company made a major fortune and is still around today, although now it is known as the DuPont Corporation.

Dry Plates and Early Film

Despite it’s drawbacks and complexity, wet plate photography had a long life by today’s standards, over 20 years. Photographers, then, as now, were always searching for a better way, though. In the early 1870s, R.L. Maddox began putting silver bromide in a layer of gelatin on glass plates, and letting it dry — the birth of dry plate photography. It wasn’t popular at first, but a few years later Charles Harper Bennett found that heating the plates made them more stable and more light sensitive. Then, as now, increased light sensitivity attracts photographers like moths to a candle. Within a year or two, dry plate photography had largely replaced the collodion process.

In 1879, George Eastman invented a coating machine that mass produced dry plates. Suddenly photography became something people could do without years of training. Now there was no need to spend several minutes preparing a plate before taking a single photograph, you just unwrapped a dry plate and popped it in the camera. Eastman then had the brilliant idea of coating his gelatin emulsion on rolls of paper instead of sheets of glass. Since it had a paper backing, this first film wasn’t transparent like more modern film. After exposure the gelatin film layer was stripped from the paper, coated with (guess what?) collodion, forming a transparent negative that could be used to make prints.

Eastman was rather shocked that professional photographers didn’t flock to his paper film, but professionals seemed very threatened by the idea that someone without lengthy training would be able to make photographs. Charles Dodson (AKA Lewis Carroll) was, in addition to being an author, one of the premier portrait photographers of the wet plate era When he first saw the new dry plates, his only remark was “Here comes the rabble”. He stopped taking photographs entirely a year later.

Alice Lidell photographed by Charles Dodson. She was the Alice who inspired Alice in Wonderland.

Eastman was a shrewd businessman and realized for every professional already taking pictures, there were dozens of nonprofessionals who wanted to. He marketed his invention to the masses, making small, self-contained cameras that people could use with virtually no training. They could even send him their film for development and printing. Eastman named his company Kodak because he liked the letter ‘K’, he felt the name could not be mispronounced, and it didn’t resemble any word used in photography at that time. He wanted everyone to know his company was completely different from the photography suppliers of the day.

Celluloid

Gelatin films had the nice advantage of not exploding, but we photographers apparently just can’t leave exploding stuff alone. Especially nitrocellulose, there’s just something about guncotton that apparently attracts us. Way back in 1855 Alexander Parkes discovered that if you could dissolve your guncotton in camphor (instead of ether and alcohol) you got a thick gel that you could mold into almost any shape, which would then dry to a strong solid. By some definitions, this was the first plastic.

Being a modest man, Parkes called the substance Parkesine and started a company to manufacture and market it. Probably because of the awful name, he went bankrupt. He gave his patents to a friend, Daniel Spill, and apparently also sold them to John Hyatt, who had also independently developed a similar substance and also patented that. Both men went on to successfully market the same product as Xylonite and Celluloid, respectively. They both were successful, made lots of money, and entertained themselves by suing each other over patent rights for the next decade.

Hyatt’s first use of celluloid was the manufacture of billiard balls (I know what you’re thinking, but really this does have some relation to photography. Hang on for a minute.) Until that time billiard balls were made of ivory which made them rather expensive (this was way before PETA and the EPA, so expense was considered the only drawback to ivory billiard balls). Celluloid billiard balls were wildly successful and billiards moved from the parlors of rich men to taverns and sleazy corner pool halls where we enjoy it today. Celluloid billiard balls did have a downside, however. Celluloid is still largely made from nitrocellulose (guncotton), so if you hit the balls a bit too hard . . . .

The photographic world also saw the potential in celluloid and both George Eastman’s Kodak Company and a gentleman named Hannibal Goodwin patented methods for making photographic film on flexible sheets of celluloid. By 1889 Eastman had developed commercial roll film and along with Thomas Edison’s invention of the Kinetoscope in 1891 and Louis Lumiere’s Cinematographe in 1895, motion pictures were born. Mr. Goodwin, unfortunately, did not get the patent for his invention until 1898. He started his own film company, but died before he began production. His heirs did quite well, however, suing the Kodak company for patent infringement and receiving the amazing sum of $5,000,000 in 1914. Of course, by that time, writing a check for $5,000,000 was petty cash for Kodak.

Unfortunately, however, history does tend to repeat itself. Once again, photographers were playing with stuff made from nitrocellulose, and once again, bad things would happen. In 1897 the celluloid film being shown in a Paris movie theatre caught fire, burning the theatre to the ground and killing 120 patrons. This caused some countries to require that movie theaters line projection booths with tin and lock the projectionist inside so if the film burst into flames, there was no chance of the fire spreading. I assume this is when projectionists started getting paid more than the kids selling popcorn.

Safe Film and the End of Nitrocellulose

Despite it’s risk, celluloid film had so many advantages that it was the main type of photographic and motion picture film used until the 1930s. A different, but similar, chemical, cellulose acetate had been developed in 1904 and the Kodak company actually bought patents and manufactured film from it as early as 1908. It was more expensive than celluloid film and a bit more difficult to work with, so it was not particularly successful. It became easier to manufacture and less expensive in the 1920. Marketed as ‘safety film’, because it would melt, but not burn, when exposed to fire, cellulose acetate had largely replaced flammable celluloid by the 1930s. The ‘celluloid’ name remained in common use for decades, however.

Photography had done a lot to keep dangerous nitrocellulose in common use, so its probably fitting that photography helped end it’s use (other than for college pranks and some purposeful explosions). In the early 1900s, a Belgian chemist named Leo Baekeland emigrated to the United States, hoping to make his fortune from chemical inventions. He was unsuccessful for some years, but in 1893 he invented a new type of photographic paper that eliminated the washing and heating steps needed to develop prints. He was nearly bankrupt by this time and approached George Eastman, asking $50,000 for the patents (but having told friends he would happily take $25,000). Eastman immediately offered the amazing sum of $750,000 for Baekeland’s patents.

Baekeland, being no fool, took the money and bought himself a first class chemistry laboratory (and a house and probably some stuff for his wife). In 1907 he produced the first real plastic, which he called Bakelite. Within a few years, Bakelite had a thousand uses: it was an artificial shellac, the major insulator in all electrical appliances, made up most nonmetallic car parts, handles for kitchen equipment, plates and dishes, even knobs and telephones. It never exploded and really didn’t even burn easily. Bakelite was THE plastic for a generation. Today it has largely been replaced by newer plastics, but it’s still used as electrical insulator. And it has one other use that continues to make it popular to this day: Bakelite is the substance used to make non-exploding billiard balls.

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

April, 2012

Referemces:

Helmenstine, A. M: http://chemistry.about.com/b/2012/02/18/make-nitrocellulose-or-flash-paper.htm

Ths History of Kodak. http://www.kodak.com/ek/US/en/Our_Company/History_of_Kodak/Imaging-_the_basics.htm

Le Couteur and Burreson: Napoleon’s Buttons: 17 Molecules that Changed History.  Chapter 3: Cellulose. Penguin Press, 2004.

Lauer and Robinson: The History of Celluloid. Plastics Historical.

Lienhard, J. H.: Collodion. http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi608.htm

Wikepedia: Collodion Process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collodion_process

Wikepedia: Celluloid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celluloid

Wikepedia: History of Film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_film

A pair of Darlot Petzval lenses, circa 1870

When we removed the elements to clean them, we found Darlot’s signature in pencil along the edges. That’s not unheard of, in the old days some Lensmakers were so proud of their lenses that they would sign the edge of the elements before inserting them.

Darlot's signature in pencil along the edge of the front element

The front element in this one also had a set of numbers along the edge that we didn’t understand until we took out the second element: it was also signed and had the same number. We assume this was Darlot’s version of a serial number (serial numbers etched into the brass came a bit later).

Identical numbers (group order transposed) on the other edge of the glass

At least that’s our best guess as to the explanation. But maybe someone out there has some more information. If you do, please leave a comment. Or better yet come visit our booth at imaging USA and you can take some pictures with it if you like (well, as long as you have a Canon mount camera) or just look at it if you don’t. And it works surprisingly well – the subject matter below leaves a lot to be desired, but I bet your current lens won’t work this well when it’s 140 years old.

Aaron at about 10 feet with small Petzval lens on 5D II

Joey at about 15 feet with the Darlot Petzval in this article

It seemed like it would be a good idea to expand the list of the most important developments in still photography that I started in my last article. In doing so, I made some slight modifications to the first few events in order to make the list more complete. Yeah, I like that. We’ll go with that.

So, ladies and gentleman: without further ado, here for your argumentative pleasure, in order, are the most important technical developments in still photography as we practice the craft today. And if you think, perhaps, this list is less correct than it could be, feel free to leave a comment.

The Most Important Developments in Photography

1. Invention of the camera. Daguerre. 1837.

Without the camera, nothing else really matters, so this has to go first. Although you could argue a bit over how much it was Daguerre’s invention.

2. Collodion wet plate process developed. Archer, 1851.

Without good negatives and prints, photography only mattered to a few people. Even before the internet photographers wanted to show everyone their photographs.

3. Optical crown and flint glass. Abbe and Schott (Zeiss), 1880s.

If you don’t have good glass, you can’t have sharp lenses. How can you have sharp lenses if you don’t have good glass?

4. Anti-reflective coatings. Smakula (Zeiss), 1935.

Without anti-reflective coatings, only a few glass elements can be used in a lens. Do you have any lenses with just a few glass elements?

5. Photographic film. Eastman, 1880s.

“Here come the rabble.” was Charles Dodson’s (AKA Lewis Carrol) remark when he was first told about the new invention, film. He stopped photographing soon afterwards. He was right: the rabble was us — all the millions of camera users who didn’t want to mix collodion and coat it on glass plates.

6. Cooke Triplet Lens. Tayler, 1896.

The nearly perfect lens, it led to the development of more modern lenses (including the zoom lens) than any other lens ever.

7. Image-forming CCD chip. Fairchild Semiconductor, 1973.

Of course there was photography before digital, but digital is the most important camera development since film. At least it is to 98% of us.

8. Mathematical formulas used to calculate lens design. Petzval, 1840.

This could be ranked higher or lower: there were many good lenses designed by trial and error. But all modern lenses (since 1900) are designed by formula and calculation.

9.  Phototelegraphy (transmitting photos by wire). Korn, 1902.

Until television was invented (and even after) this was how most people got to see world events. And it made photojournalists and sports photographers employable. The only thing better than being a full-time photographer is being an employed full-time photographer.

10. 35mm photo camera developed using sprocketed movie film. Barnack (Leica), 1914.

It’s still the genre we use, so I have to give some props to that. But it was more a convenience and economic decision than a brilliant innovation. And it’s what started Leica (before there were collectors looking for platinum and ostrich skin cameras).

11. Strobe lights for photography. Edgerton, 1923.

What, you want to use flash bulbs? Really? Well, actually people mostly did for 40 years or so. Bulbs were cheap, strobes were expensive. Come to think of it, strobes are still expensive. Whatever happened to bulbs?

12. First zoom lens (for photography). Voigtlander, 1959.

I guess this was a good thing? It is a good thing! The majority is always right! Zooms for the People!! (Blend in with the herd, Roger, or the wolves will get you first!)

13. Photoshop. Adobe, 1990.

With apologies to those shooting film, digital is today’s photography and Photoshop had a lot to do with making it that way.

14. Autofocus. Minolta (who stole it from Honeywell), 1985.

See comment for number 12. Actually, now that my  age starts with a “5″ I’m beginning to think maybe autofocus is a good thing. But for those who claim it’s absolutely necessary, I point out that Neil Leifer never used it, and he probably was the greatest action sports photographer ever. But that was back when men were made of iron and ships made of wood.

15.  Exakta SLR camera. 1936

The first SLR. Without this we’d all be shooting rangefinders, looking down at our waist-level finders, or pulling a cloth hood over our heads to see the ground glass.

16. Image stabilization. Canon, 1976 (patented)

IS, VR, OS, or whatever they choose to call it improves the sharpness of photographs in some cases, and improves the bottom line of the camera manufacturer in every case.

17. Multi-layer color film. Kodak, 1936.

Well, it’s not necessary, obviously, but like the song said “Momma, don’t take my kodachrome away”. (Nobody ever wrote a song about Agfa Scala 200X or Ilford HP5 Plus.) Sunsets, tropical fish, and fashion catalogues just lose something in black and white. Zebras don’t though.

18. Bayer filter-mosaic. Kodak, 1975.

See number 17. There are about a million internet discussion about ‘isn’t there a better way to create digital color than the Bayer filter?’, but apparently there isn’t. As soon as someone comes up with one (no, Foveon is not it, at least not yet) I’ll drop it off the list.

19. Tie: Nikon F- SLR, Nikon, 1959. CDS-100 SLR, Kodak, 1991. Canon Digital Rebel (KISS), Canon, 2003.

They all helped shaped the photography we do today. In order they are: the first professional quality film SLR; the first professional quality digital SLR; and the first high-quality digital SLR priced for the rabble, as Dodson would say. None ranks higher than this, though, because all were just ‘first to the market’. Someone else was on their heels and would have released a similar product a year or two later.

So there you have it, the complete, annotated list of the most important the technical developments that shaped photography as we practice it today.

It is possible, however unlikely, that one or several thousand of you might have some small disagreement with this list. If so just leave me a comment. As you can tell I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong. Or at least admitting when I’m not quite as correct as I had planned to be.

The 6 basic types of camera lens

Most of you, being skilled mathematicians, have already figured out that if the first three lenses only gave rise to the standard range primes, the other three (Telephoto, Reverse Telephoto, and Cooke Triplet) must have a lot more descendants. They do, so we’ve got a lot of ground to cover in this article.

The Lens Family Tree Part 2

The Telephoto Lens

First, the definition of telephoto is not “long focal length.” It’s “the lens is physically shorter than its focal length.” This is really quite handy, so that your 500mm lens doesn’t have to be 500mm (20 inches) long. Telephoto is also a specific type of lens design. All telephoto lenses have the same key structure: a powerful front positive element and a negative rear element that spreads the focused beam of light out, magnifying the image.

Advantages: Duh! The telephoto thing!

Disadvantages: Telephoto lenses naturally have pincushion distortion, and because of the telephoto group (which reduces the amount of light reaching the sensor) are not naturally wide aperture. This can be overcome, but requires making the lens very large with a wide front element — hence the reason we don’t handhold our 400mm f/2.8 unless we’re very young and very strong.

The most significant problem with the telephoto design, however, is longitudinal chromatic aberration. The negative rear element magnifies any aberrations —  particularly longitudinal chromatic aberration (not color fringing, but rather blue light, red light, and yellow light focusing at slightly different focal lengths, making the image blurry). It is for this reason that all high-quality telephoto lenses have one or more low-dispersion elements.

History:

Telephoto lenses were developed simultaneously in the 1880s by prominent British and German lensmakers and also by a heavy drinking New Zealand geologist who (legend has it) ground his lens elements from the bottoms of his whiskey bottles. The first efforts were basically teleconverters added on to existing lenses. As you would expect, they were not of high quality. In the 1920s it was discovered that adding an additional element near the rear with a biconcave airspace (or glass equivalent) could reduce the pincushion distortion and low-dispersion elements would reduce the chromatic aberration. These improvements dramatically improved the quality of telephoto lenses.

Early on, lensmakers found splitting one strong element into two or more different elements provided several advantages. It was often less expensive to manufacture two weaker elements than one strong one and different glass types could be used for the two elements (reducing chromatic aberration). Most importantly, each glass surface can be bent or curved slightly differently to reduce one aberration or another. Splitting a single element into two separate elements gives the lensmaker four surfaces to bend rather than two.

Lensmakers were splitting and combining elements very early in the development of telephoto lenses, hoping to correct its inherent problems. One of the first telephoto lenses, the Zeiss Tele-Tubus of 1901, used multiple cemented elements to make up the positive front element and negative rear element of the lens, for example. Why cemented elements, rather than separate? Because lens coatings (which reduce light reflection) weren’t practical until the late 1930s, so every glass-air interface caused light reflection and reduced contrast. Cemented elements avoided that problem.

The Zeiss Tele-Tubus of 1901. The front group is still positive, the rear negative.

You have to look a bit carefully to see the basic ‘telephoto’ design in a modern telephoto lens: the simple positive and negative elements are always split into several separate elements, sometimes with a couple of additional elements to help control aberrations (and since we now have anti-reflective lens coatings, there’s no need to always cement them). There is usually an additional ‘collective’ group near the rear to eliminate pincushion distortion. However, the basic design remains: positive (convex) elements in the front, negative (concave) elements in the rear.

Lens diagrams of 3 telephoto lenses showing the positive front, negative rear construction and the liberal use of low dispersion glass (colored) in the positive elements.

Most SLR lenses of 135mm or greater are telephoto designs. The telephoto design is also used, surprisingly enough, when a very compact lens is needed (remember one definition of telephoto lens is ‘the lens is shorter than it’s focal length’).  The tiny lenses used in the old Kodak disc cameras (equivalent to 44mm at f/2.8) were telephoto designs, keeping the lens very small. While the telephoto design does have several inherent problems, modern lensmakers have overcome them very consistently. Supertelephoto prime lenses today are among the sharpest lenses with the least aberration of any lenses made.

The Reverse Telephoto (retrofocus) Lens

The design of the reverse telephoto is, to no one’s surprise, exactly the opposite of the telephoto design: there is a strong negative element in front and a positive element in the rear.

Advantages: Allows focal length shorter than backfocus distance (the distance between the rearmost element and the sensor). This allows a lens of, say, 20mm focal length to have  a rear element more than 20mm in front of the sensor (absolutely needed in an SLR, so the mirror has room to flip up without hitting the back of the lens). The design also provides a relatively high aperture with a wide field of view, has minimal vignetting and rarely has spherical aberration.

Disadvantages: Curvature of the field of focus is common. Aberrations change with near-far focus changes, so a lens that’s well corrected at infinity may not be at near focus, or vice-versa. Aberrations at wider angles are multiple and severe (coma and lateral chromatic aberration, as well as distortion), requiring numerous elements to correct them all. Distortion is particularly difficult to correct (some consider a fisheye lens simply an uncorrected reverse telephoto of very wide field of view).

A reverse telephoto is also usually a large lens. Have you noticed that 50mm lenses are usually the smallest, but lenses longer and shorter than 50mm both tend to be larger in size for an SLR? If you look at rangefinder lenses, that’s not always the case because they don’t require as much clearance.

History: The reverse telephoto was first designed in the 1920s for the movie industry: they needed lenses with long backfocus distances (distance from the back of the lens to the sensor) for Technicolor movie cameras, because the prism used in those cameras took up a significant space right behind the lens mount. Angenieux actually trademarked the term “retrofocus” so other makers for a time had to use the term “reverse telephoto” to describe their lenses. Today the terms retrofocus and reverse telephoto are used interchangeably to describe lenses of this type.

The design of the original Angenieux retrofocus lens showing the negative element in front, positive in the rear and several corrective elements between. Wikipedia commons.

When SLR cameras were first introduced in the 1930s, there were no wide-angle lenses available because an SLR camera requires the back of the lens to be far enough forward from the imaging plane that the mirror can flip-up during exposure. The Exactas (the first SLR) and other early SLRs had to use lenses of 40mm or longer until the retrofocus design was adapted for photography.

Cross section of a 1940s Exacta SLR demonstrating the back of the lens (green arrow) has to be far enough forward to allow the mirror (red arrow) to swing up when taking a picture.

Today any SLR lens wider than 40mm must be a retrofocus design. The negative front elements are almost always bent in a meniscus shape, and there are likely to be two or more of them. (The meniscus shape helps correct the field curvature and certain aberrations.) Similarly there are usually two or more positive elements at the rear of the lens, with several other elements in between. Almost every modern, high-quality reverse telephoto lens will have at least one aspheric element and wide-angle, wide-aperture lenses often have several to further reduce aberrations.

As you can see from the 3 examples below, retrofocus lenses tend to become more complex as the focal length becomes wider.

Three Canon retrofocus lenses. From the left, 35mm f/1.4, 24mm f/1.4 and 14mm f/2.8

The multiple elements are required not just to form the image, but to correct the multiple aberrations the design naturally has – especially when you recall that the aberrations are going to be different at different focusing distances. A retrofocus lens, for example, may have prominent astigmatism when focused on nearby objects that disappears and is replaced by coma when focusing further away, etc. etc.

The number of elements and the design itself explains why a 24mm f/1.4 is usually more expensive and physically larger than a 50mm f/1.4. Look at the cutaway of a Zeiss 21mm f/2.8 lens below. Notice not just the number of glass elements but the multiple metal clips, stays, and shims required to hold them all in place. It’s pretty easy to see how one element might be slightly off center or tilted. Very wide-angle lenses are delicate things and a bit prone to side-to-side variation in sharpness for just that reason.

One interesting fact I encountered when researching lens design was that a small amount of distortion is often a trade-off for increased resolution. Therefore, the distortion found in two very sharp retrofocus lenses I shoot with (The Zeiss 21mm and Nikon 24mm f/1.4) may have been a conscious choice of the designer to maintain sharpness, not a design flaw.

The Cooke Triplet Lens

Lens diagram of a Cooke Triplet.

The most important lens, the one that gave rise to more lenses than any other, I saved for last. The triplet is possibly the most important design ever — not just because it gave rise to a huge number of other lenses in the first half of the 20th century, but because a simple trait of the triplet lens is found in the vast majority of lenses we shoot with today.

Advantages: Simple and inexpensive to produce. Gives reasonably good correction of all aberrations.

Disadvantages: Without modification is not effective at apertures greater than f/2.8 or at a field of view greater than 60 degrees (equivalent to 35mm on a full-frame SLR). The strong elements require very exact adjustments and tight manufacturing tolerances. (In fact, the original triplets were manufactured with the center element set in adjusting screws which were fine tuned on a test bench and then cemented in place before it was sold.)

History: Dennis Taylor designed the triplet lens in the 1890s and it was produced by the Taylor Hobson Company and many other manufacturers. (If you want to know why it was named The Cooke Triplet instead of the Taylor Triplet, you’ll have to read about that here, it’s a long story.) The triplet is the simplest design that can correct all 7 major aberrations. Over the years more than 80 different patents have been issued for variations of the triplet lens design.

A number of well-known, high-quality lenses are modified triplets. Splitting the front or rear element of a triplet increased the aperture and led to Zeiss Sonnar and Leitz Elmar lenses. Most original Leica lenses were modified triplets. And if you look back at the image of the Exacta camera above you’ll notice it came with a 50mm triplet lens. Triplets were the lenses that came with the vast majority of home movie cameras, box cameras, and most small fixed-lens cameras. Even today, some 50 to 150mm lenses still retain a triplet basis, although the front and rear elements are usually split or otherwise modified.

Despite being the dominant lenses for cameras in general for most of the 1900s, classic triplets were generally replaced by other types of lenses for SLRs. However, the Triplet gave rise to much more than a few good primes and thousands of economy lenses. Early on Dennis Taylor realized one of the advantages of his lens was that it was very simple to make it in different focal lengths. Move the center element closer to the front or back element and the field of view became wider or narrower. It was this ability of the Triplet that led, eventually, to the development of the zoom lenses we use every day.

Moving the central element in relation to the front or rear element of a Cooke Triplet lens changes the field of view from wider to narrower.

Zoom Lenses are Hybrid Lenses

It was one thing to move the center element when designing a lens of different focal length: the designer had to change the curvature and strength of the front and rear elements to compensate for the change in aberrations caused by moving the central element. It was quite another thing to make one  lens that the photographer could zoom to several focal lengths. Although a patent was issued in 1901 for a triplet lens with a moveable central element that allowed a zoom effect (called, in a fit of originality, “The Adjustable Lens”) it still had to be refocused on a bellows after every ‘zoom’ movement, it changed focal length very little, and it wasn’t of great quality. (Not many were sold originally, and if you see one for sale now, let me know. I want it for my collection.)

In the 1930s, the Taylor Hobson Company (the original manufacturer of the Cooke Triplet) released a motion picture lens that combined a negative front element (like a reverse telephoto), a negative rear element (like a telephoto), and in the center placed a Double-Gauss lens (somewhat like the center element of a triplet). By moving the center lens in relation to the front and rear elements, their “Varo” lens could zoom from 40mm to 120mm.

The Varo lens was a huge thing housed in a square aluminum box that weighed about 7 pounds. This wasn’t an issue for cinematographers but it wasn’t something a photographer could lug around.  It took until the 1950s for Voigtlander to introduce the first zoom lens for SLRs, the Zoomar 36-82mm.

Every zoom lens can trace its ancestry back to the moving central element of a triplet lens, but if you look at the lens diagram of a zoom lens, you’ll be hard pressed to find a clear triplet group in there. That’s because zoom lenses, by definition, have to combine the features of several different lens types in order to do their job. If you look carefully, though, you can often find them. I’ve added some color to the lens diagram of the original Zoomar (shown below courtesy Wikipedia Commons) to demonstrate.

Diagram of the original Voigtlander Zoomar lens.

The Zoomar had a triplet made of two positive groups (blue) around a central negative group (green) in the center: a split element version of the original Triplet design. When zooming, the two positive groups changed distances around the central negative group, causing the lens to change focal length. The lens also has a bit of a retrofocus design with a negative element in front and a positive group near the rear (in yellow). Most standard range zooms even today keep that pattern.

Looking at the complex designs of modern zooms, it can be somewhat difficult to see their heritage, but sometimes you can. The genealogy of wide-angle zooms are the easiest to see: since they are wider than 35mm then they must be a reverse telephoto lens. Indeed, most wide-angle zooms look much like like the reverse telephoto designs they are, with negative front elements and positive rear elements. They also have separation of front, central, and rear groups allowing the lens to zoom when the groups shift in relation to each other.

Left to right: Nikon 14-24, Sigma 8-16, and Tamron 16-35 zooms show their retrofocus heritage.

Being of reverse telephoto design, wide-angle zooms are prone to distortion, coma, and other aberrations and are likely to have multiple elements, some of which will be aspheric, to help correct these.

Purely telephoto zooms also show their telephoto ancestry, with positive front and negative rear elements like a standard telephoto design, but they also have a central zoom group between the other two. Like other telephoto lenses they’ll have some low-dispersion elements to help control the longitudinal chromatic aberration that all telephoto lenses have, and a biconcave airspace in one of the rear groups to help correct pincushion distortion.

Left to right: Tamron 200-500, Sigma 120-300, and Nikon 80-400 telephoto zooms.

Standard range zooms, like a 24-70, tend to have a mildly reverse telephoto design, with negative front and positive rear elements. The better ones contain both aspheric and low dispersion elements.

Nikon (left) and Canon 24-70 zooms, showing the 'negative front, positive rear' design and both aspheric and low dispersion elements standard zooms usually require

With superzooms (those 10X things we all turn our noses up at in public and then take on vacation) it’s difficult to see the lens’ heritage just by looking at the diagram. They often have positive front elements like a telephoto, positive rear elements like a reverse telephoto, and a bunch of other elements in between to try to correct all the distortion and aberration that comes from trying to be all things to all people. There’s a reason superzooms didn’t come into being until lenses became computer designed. The complexity is far too much for mere humans to design.

Superzooms (L to R): Nikon 28-300, Tamron 18-270, Canon 18-200 all showing the 'positive front, positive rear' design common to this type of zoom.

But even though it’s not obvious from the lens design, deep in the computer programs that were used to design those lenses, the same principles learned from those basic lens designs still apply. They’re the reason your zoom lens tends to have barrel distortion at the wide end and pincushion distortion at the long end. They’re the reason why every zoom is sharper at a certain focal length, and not as good at others.

It also explains why every every manufacturer’s zooms tend to occur in the same groups of focal lengths. Wide angle zooms in the 14-35mm range (14-24, 16-35, etc.) because that’s a reverse telephoto design. Telephoto zooms in the 70-200 and greater range because that’s a telephoto design. Standard zooms in the 24-70 range because that’s a weakly reverse telephoto design. And why “superzooms” that cover every range as a rule don’t cover it all that well: they have to be strong reverse telephoto, weak reverse telephoto and telephoto all in one.

References:

Fischer, R, et al: Optical System Design, 2nd Edition.McGraw-Hill. 2008.

Geary, JM: Introduction to Lens Design. Willman-Bell. 2011.

Hallock-Smith, G: Practical Computer Aided Lens Design. Willmann-Bell, 1998.

Kingslake, R: A History of the Photographic Lens. Academic Press. 1989.

Kingslake, R and Johnson, B: Lens Design Fundamentals. Academic Press. 1978

Laikin, M: Lens Design, 4th Edition. CRC Press. 2007.

Ray, S: Applied Photographic Optics, 3rd Edition. Focal Press. 2002.

Smith, WJ: Modern Lens Design: McGraw-Hill. 1992

Wikepedia. The History of the Single-lens Reflex Camera

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

September, 2011

Where do new lens designs come from?

I knew that today’s lenses are all designed using computer programs, but  I was surprised to find new lenses aren’t designed from scratch. Designers start with an existing lens design and modify it.  Of course, a lens designer doesn’t say “this lens really sucks, let’s use it as our starting point”. They start with a good design and try to improve it.

So camera lenses, like Darwin’s finches, obey a very strict “survival of the fittest” law. Good lenses are copied and modified (sometimes to improve them, sometimes to get around patent restrictions) until there are dozens of similar lenses marketed by different manufacturers. Bad lenses fairly quickly fade away.

Even knowing this, when I wrote a series of articles on the development of camera lenses, I was amazed to find  that virtually every camera lens in use today can trace its heritage back to one of five lenses, four of which were developed by 1900. Given the literally thousands of lenses that have been created, I found this really surprising: no matter what lens we use today it was probably available in basic form near 1900.

Does the pedigree of a lens matter?

Well, actually it does a bit. Those original lenses, in their pure form, each had strengths and weaknesses. Modern lenses derived from them have ‘inherited’ those same underlying tendencies. Many of the complex technologies used in a modern lens are put there to correct the underlying problems of the original design.

Knowing the ancestry of a lens can be interesting from a historical standpoint. For example, I know that the $400 Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens I shot with this weekend is the same basic design as an $8,000 Cook Panchro 50mm Cine lens. It’s also interesting technically: that Canon 50mm f/1.4 inherits the same basic design as the Canon 50mm f/1.2, Sigma 50mm f/1.4, Nikon 50mm f/1.4 G, and Voigtlander 50mm f/1.1, among others. That explains why they all have a natural tendency toward a bit of astigmatism and spherical aberration in the edges.

Early Lenses Designs

The first lenses were rather simple things. But two important principles had been discovered way before photography was even invented:

• The meniscus lens showed that “bending” a simple lens could correct much of the spherical aberration and field curvature that a simple convex or concave lens had.
• The achromatic doublet showed that a pair of lenses, made of glass of different refracting and dispersion indexes, could reduce chromatic aberration.

A mensicus lens (left) and an achromatic doublet

After the invention of the Daguerrotype camera lens design improved rapidly and literally hundreds of photographic lenses had been marketed by the early 1900s. Most were dead ends, but six lenses, five of which were developed by 1900, gave rise to most of the lenses we use today. The 6th lens that gave rise to the rest, the reversed telephoto or retrofocus lens, wasn’t developed until the 1920s for movie cameras and then in the late 1930s for the first SLR cameras.

The 6 lenses that are the ancestors of all modern photography lenses

Today we’ll look at lenses derived from the first three of these six “original” lens types (trying to keep this post at less-than-novel-length). If you shoot an SLR and have a prime lens of 50mm to 100mm in your camera bag, chances are pretty high you’ll find it’s a direct descendant of one of the three lenses we’ll cover today. If you shoot with a rangefinder, medium format, or high-end video camera, chances are every prime lens you shoot with (even the wider focal lengths) is descended from one of these lenses.

The Lens Family Tree

The Petzval Portrait lens

Advantages: Excellent center sharpness at fairly wide aperture, low vignetting.

Disadvantages: Marked astigmatism and field curvature limit it to a fairly narrow angle of view.

History: Designed before 1850, it was an amazingly important lens and the mainstay of portrait photographers for half a century. Relatively few modern photographic lenses can trace their lineage back to this lens. However, Petzval-type lenses were used in the majority of slide and movie projectors until the 1950s. They were also was the basis for the Kodak f1.9 Cine lens, used on thousands of Kodak 16mm movie cameras, and some moderate telephoto lenses based on the Petzval design made until the 1950s.

The Symmetrical (Rapid Rectilinear) lenses

Advantages: A symmetrical design provides almost complete elimination of distortion, coma, and lateral chromatic aberration.

Disadvantages: Have a tendency to have spherical aberration, field curvature, and astigmatism which usually limits them to moderate aperture (f/2.8 or narrower). Even at moderate aperture, modern lenses based on this design require additional elements to correct these aberrations, sometimes making symmetrical lenses complex and expensive.

History: The Rapid Rectilinear lens, developed in the 1860s, was the fist symmetrical lens (lenses with nearly identical elements on either side of a central stop) of good optical quality. It provided photographers a reasonably wide-aperture, wide-angle lens that was nearly free of distortion. They were the landscape and architectural lens from the 1860s to the turn of the century (as in 1900, not as in 2000). With the advent of high and low index glass, the Rapid Rectilinear design could be modified to reduce astigmatism and field curvature, making them even better.

Lenses developed from the Rapid Rectilinear

The Zeiss Protar (originally called the Anastigmat, meaning no astigmatism), a symmetrical lens designed in 1890, is considered the first modern camera lens. Over the years, better lensmaking techniques allowed the number of elements to be increased and the front and rear element sizes to be modified, but the general symmetry around the center stop was maintained. Today’s Schneider Angulon and Leica Super Angulon lenses are direct descendants of the Protar.

Zeiss found that if they separated the front elements a bit, rather than cementing them, they could further reduce other aberrations. This lens, the Tessar, looks a bit like the Cooke Triplet discussed in the next article. The Triplet may have influenced the designer, Dr. Paul Rudolph, but the Tessar clearly derived from the Protar.

Literally dozens of  today’s excellent lenses are simply modifications of the Tessar: Leitz Elmars, Zeiss Sonnars, Kodak Ektars, Schneider Xenars, Voigltander Heliostigmats and Skopars, even the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 are all Tessar variations. If you own lens in the 35 to 110mm range providing very good quality at a reasonable price, usually with maximum apertures of f/2.8, chances are it’s a fairly direct descendants of the Tessar.

The Double Gauss Lenses

The Double Gauss lenses rely on symmetry to flatten field curvature and reduce aberrations, but combine positive and negative elements, all bent in a meniscus towards the center and containing spaces between the elements rather than cementing them together.

Advantages: The doubled elements allow wider apertures than most other lens types, especially when made unsymmetrical. Double Gauss lenses generally have little field curvature or chromatic aberration.

Disadvantages: They do have a tendency towards oblique spherical aberration and astigmatism. In their original versions they didn’t have very good resolution.

Derivatives of the Double Gauss Lens

History: The lure of wide aperture has always been impossible to ignore and the same Dr. Rudolph who designed the Protar and Tessar modified the double gauss design by using a pair of thick cemented elements for the inner element of the lens. The resulting lens, the Zeiss Planar, remains in common use today.

In the 1920s, the designers at Taylor Hobson found the design didn’t have to be perfectly symmetrical, they could alter the size and type of glass in the different elements, which increased the aperture even further. This lens (which Taylor Hobson called the Opic) led directly to development of the  Schneider Xenon and Zeiss Biotar photographic lenses. In the cinema world the Cooke Speed Panchro and Angenieux S-type lenses are Planar derivatives.

The design can be further modified with an extra element or two, but the Double Gauss basis is still there. A classic design has 6 elements which is usually sufficient for an aperture f2.0. Lenses with wider apertures  usually require 7 elements or even 8 elements (the extra elements added to control aberrations and astigmatism).

If you shoot with a good-or-great quality wide-aperture prime lens chances are high that it’s a Double Gauss design. They are the dominant design for the 50mm focal length, although they can be made a bit longer or wider. Most spectacularly wide-aperture lenses, including the Leica 50mm 0.95, Canon 50mm f1.0 and the legendary Zeiss 75mm f/0.85 are designs of this type. Many Leica Summarits, Summicrons and Noktilux lenses; almost every 50mm prime made by any manufacturer; and a host of other modern lenses are basically modified Planars.

Recent double-Gauss design lenses. courtesy Wikipedia Commons

Summary:

If you have a wide-aperture prime lens of 50mm to 85mm for your SLR camera (or any prime lens for your rangefinder or medium format camera) take a look at its lens diagram. Chances are high you’ll see the core of a symmetrical or double gauss lens, with a few additional elements (or perhaps one of the core elements split in two).

Look at the diagram below for a few obvious examples from modern lenses. The two lenses on the left are the Canon 50mm f/1.4 (top) and f/1.2 (bottom). In the center are 50mm f/1.4 lenses from Sigma (top) and Nikon (bottom). In each of them you can clearly see the central elements are very similar to the Taylor Hobson Opic lens diagram above (and to each other). The different designers have modified the curves of the elements, the glass type used, and most apparently the rear elements to correct the natural aberrations of the lens in different ways. (The lens on the top right is a 24mm and bottom right 135mm, neither of which are based on a Double-Gauss design).

Four wide-aperture 50mm lenses (left) compared to a 24mm f2.8 (upper right) and 135mm f2 (lower right) lens. The common heritage of the wide-aperture primes is apparent.

It’s also not surprising that each of the 50mm lenses have some characteristics in common (wickedly sharp in the center, a bit of field curvature, a bit of edge astigmatism, etc.).

Both the 24mm and 135mm lenses in the image above get their heritage from a different type of lens, which is very obvious when you compare their diagrams to the 4 similar lenses on the left. These other designs have their own core characteristics, but that discussion will have to wait for the next article. This one has gone on long enough.

References:

Fischer, R, et al: Optical System Design, 2nd Edition.McGraw-Hill. 2008.

Kingslake, R: A History of the Photographic Lens. Academic Press. 1989.

Kingslake, R and Johnson, B: Lens Design Fundamentals. Academic Press. 1978

Laikin, M: Lens Design, 4th Edition. CRC Press. 2007.

Ray, S: Applied Photographic Optics, 3rd Edition. Focal Press. 2002.

Smith, WJ: Modern Lens Design: McGraw-Hill. 1992

Wikipedia: Double-Gauss Lenses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Gauss_lens

Wikipedia: History and Technical Development of Photographic Camera Lenses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_lens#History_and_technical_development_of_photographic_camera_lenses

Roger Cicala

Lensrentals.com

August, 2011