44 Queen Ann St London – <1>
Feb. 27. 1839
Dear Sir
Your letter was only forwarded to me today, or I should have replied to it sooner – I beg your acceptance of the inclosed photograph<2> representing a gauze ribband <3> –: I believe it is fixed, but you can try whether it is or not; if the sunshine should injure it I will change it for another – I described my process in its most essential particulars to the Royal Society Thursday;<4> and the account was copied into the Literary Gazette & Athenæum <5> of Saturday – There are however various minutiæ, which if attended to improve the results. The only objection I can possibly have to Sir D. Brewster’s <6> showing the few specimens I sent him, is, that they give no adequate idea of the method, or of any part of it, being in fact the only things that I happened to have disposable the morning I sent them – But I begged him to understand that so far from being the ne plus ultra of photogenic performance they were literally the ne minus ultra <7> and I hope he said so to the friends to whom he may have shown them.– Daguerre’s <8> secret is certainly for sale; but then he asks 10,000£ for it. I am in great hope of improvement in the sensibility of my paper; and intend making fresh experiments on the subject.
I am glad to see you have undertaken the question of the penetration of solar heat into the Earth, with so much zeal.<9> The differences which you have found attributable to the nature of the soil, are much greater than I should have anticipated. I should be glad if at least one of the stations possessed a double set of thermometers, 20 or 30 yards distant from each other, for the sake of verifying that it is the soil which makes this difference–
Believe me Dear Sir Yours most truly
H. Fox Talbot
Mr Fox Talbot
Feb. 1839
With Photogenic Drawing
Notes:
1. The London home of the Mundy family and a frequent base for WHFT.
2. For Talbot, this is a very early acceptance of the alternative term ‘photograph’, a more flexible root word suggested to him by his two friends Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875), scientist and Sir John Frederick William Herschel (1792–1871), astronomer & scientist, Doc. No: 03786 and Doc. No: 03801 on 2 and 10 February respectively.
3. WHFT sent numerous examples of these photograms of lace to various friends, introducing them to the process. Although the one he sent to Forbes has not been located, a close companion is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.; 1995.206.277, Schaaf 3734. Displaying an irregularly shaped area of sensitization, it has darkened over time, but in certain areas the weave of the ribband is clearly visible. It was dated by WHFT in pencil "Feb. 26/39" and was made in the same session as the one sent to Forbes. In WHFT's memoranda book, Lacock June 1838, on 27 Feb 1839 he recorded "3 ribbons, 5 stripes = 8" and "4 fixed 4 not". Seven of these were sent to friends and colleagues, including Forbes, Sir John Herschel and Prof John Lindley, and the 8th that he kept for himself must be the one that eventually wound up at the Smithsonian, for it was formerly kept at Lacock Abbey. The memoranda book is now in the British Library Fox Talbot Collection.
4. This was his process of photogenic drawing, which he had formerly called sciagraphy, which was a silver-based print-out process. It could be used either in a camera or by contact under an object and could be used to make either a negative or a print. WHFT, Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s pencil. Read before the Royal Society, January 31, 1839. A summary would eventually be printed in the Society's Proceedings. v. 4 no. 36, but Talbot immediately privately published an offprint (printed by R & J E Taylor, London, 1839). It is not known how long he used the term sciagraphy (the theatrical art of depicting objects through their shadows), nor the origins of the term photogenic drawing that he appears to have used for the first time in January 1839. In his notebook M, dated on the flyleaf "Lacock 4th December 1834" but in an entry immediately after 28 February 1835, he first conceived of the process of making a print from a negative, recording that "in the Photogenic or Sciagraphic process, if the paper is transparent, the first drawing may serve as an object, to produce a second drawing, in which the lights and shadows would be reversed. Fox Talbot Collection, The British Library, London.
5. 'The New Art,' The Literary Gazette and Journal of belles lettres, science and art, no. 1150, 2 February 1839, pp. 72-75 and 'Photogenic Drawing: Some Account...,' The Athenæum, no. 589, 9 February 1839, pp. 114-117.
6. Sir David Brewster (1781–1868), Scottish scientist & journalist. For references to his showing examples within his circle, see Doc. No: 03836, Doc. No: 03804.
7. 'So far from being at the most superior level of photogenic performance they were literally at the most inferior.'
8. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), French artist, showman & inventor.
9. WHFT would have just read Forbes's ‘Observations faites pendant une année avec des thermomètres enfouis á diverses profondeurs dans différentes localités du voisinage d’Edimbourg’, Bibliothèque Universelle de Genèva, v. 19, January 1839, pp. 196–200.