Adelaide Gallery <1>
5 Jany 1842
My dear Sir,
I send you enclosed the Electrotype <2> specimen which I stated in my letter of yesterday<3> was preparing. I find this one rather thin & I have another one in the apparatus which I shall leave until it gets more than double the substance of the one enclosed. Perhaps you will let me know if you want the plate still thicker & I shall make one of the proper substance. Is the image good enough? if not I shall try another Daguerreotype. Do you want also the original Daguerreotype?<4>
I remain, My dear Sir, Your obedt Sevt
A Claudet
H.F. Talbot Esqr
Lacock Abbey
Notes:
1. Adelaide Gallery, Strand, London: Gallery of Practical Science; site of Antoine Claudet’s photographic studio.
2. Electrotyping was a manufacturing method for producing facsimiles that grew up concurrently with photography, having been announced by Moritz von Jacobi in St Petersburg at the end of 1838. A mould was formed from an original (such as a printing plate) and this mould was made electrically conductive by brushing with graphite; electricity could then be used to deposit copper in this mould, thus duplicating the original. In the printing industry, it eventually supplanted the stereotype process, where a paper maché mould was employed to make duplicate plates. [See Larry J Schaaf, Sun Pictures Catalogue Twelve: Talbot and Photogravure (New York: Hans P Kraus, Jr, 2003), pp. 40–41].
3. See Doc. No: 04414.
4. Starting in the summer of 1840, WHFT experimented with various ways of strengthening daguerreotype images and more importantly in making multiple prints from these normally unique renditions. See Larry J. Schaaf, Records of the Dawn of Photography: Talbot's Notebooks P & Q (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Some of this thinking would be applied in his later photographic engraving and photoglyphic engraving processes.