Dear Sir,
I write this note to say that if it is convenient to you it will give me great pleasure to spend a couple of days with you this week. We returned last night from Ely <1> where I spent two very agreeable days with the Dean <2> after the ceremony of the Institution was over.
As I am collecting materials for an Article on the Calotype and Daguerreotype for an Article which will appear in the Edin Review <3> for Octr next, I am very anxious that you should provide me with any historical or personal details which have not yet appeared respecting the Calotype, and which I know would be very interesting. Bessel <4> put into my hands a Proof of an Article which will appear in Poggendorffs <5> next No (The Annalen &c) by Profr Moser <6> containing the most extraordinary discovery of Latent light, exhibiting itself in the formation of Pictures on clean polished Silver placed very near to any picture or body that has absorbed light inequally. Such bodies give negative & positive pictures in succession!! We had a most curious discussion on the subject on the last day of the Association. <7>
I cannot find in the ordinary Railway Guide any acct of the times or ways of travelling along the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway, tho’ a plan of it is given in the Maps of these Books.
I am Dear Sir, Ever Most Truly yrs
D Brewster
Leamington <8>18 Lower Parade
July 10th 1842
H.F. Talbot Esqr
Notes:
1. A small cathedral city 11 miles northeast of Cambridge.
2. Prof George Peacock (1791–1858), mathematician.
3. The article was a combined review of four photographic publications, in the Edinburgh Review, v. 76 no. 154, January 1843, pp. 309–344, with a supplementary note in April 1843, v. 76 no. 156, p. 563.
4. Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784–1846), astronomer.
5. Johann Christian Poggendorff (1796–1877), German physicist, editor of the Annalen der Physik und Chemie.
6. Ludwig Ferdinand Möser (1805–1880), ‘Ueber den Process des Sehens und die Wirkung des Lichts auf alle Körper’, Annalen der Physik und Chemie, v. 56 no. 6, 1842, pp. 177–234.
7. See David Brewster, ‘On a very curious fact connected with Photography, discovered by M. Möser of Königsberg, communicated by Prof. Bessel to Sir D. Brewster’, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1842, part 2, p. 14. The British Association met at Manchester in June 1842. This is a misspelling for Ludwig Ferdinand Moser (1805–1880), the German physicist and chemist.
8. Royal Leamington Spa, near Warwick, southwest of Birmingham, where the Brewsters were staying during the Summer of 1842, for Lady Brewster’s health.