Museum Practl Geology
Jermyn St
St James’s
28 April 1852
Dear Sir,
You will have been made acquainted with the result of the meeting on Tuesday – which I was compelled to call – so very strong was the expression of feeling on the subject of the Society <1> under the circumstances I believe we must abandon for the present any attempt to form a society – into which any considerations of your patent rights shall enter. Every one is quite disposed to give you all honour as the discoverer of the Calotype – but every one also says you are pushing your claims too far in claiming Iodised paper <2> – any developing agent beyond Gallic Acid <3> – and there is a common feeling that the Collodion process <4> is entirely beyond any of your specifications – & I am given to understand there are parties now preparing to practice it for trade. To me it appears – if I may venture to say so much – you would consult your own interest by granting license at the smallest possible sum so as to render it useless for any party to infringe – or to place himself in any position of doubt.–
I am Dear Sir Yours very truly
Robert Hunt
Hy Fox Talbot Esq
(over)
Did you see the paragraph in the Athenaeum last week relative to the Calotype in a notice – not very friendly – of my “Photography” <5>Notes:
1. The Photographic Club had been formed in 1847. In 1851 it was proposed to put the Club on to the more formal footing of a photographical society ‘for the disinterested advancement of the Photographic Science’. This raised the question of WHFT’s patent, many members feeling that his process should be given to the world. [See H. J. P. Arnold, William Henry Fox Talbot: Pioneer of photography and man of science (London: Hutchinson Benham, 1977), p. 188.]. Talbot’s relations with the Society never became really happy. It subsequently became the Royal Photographic Society.
2. Iodised paper was a part of ‘Photogenic Drawing’, and the ‘Calotype process’, which were invented by WHFT, however it was also part of the new process of ‘Albumen prints’.
3. The developing agent in the ‘Calotype process’.
4. The wet collodion on glass negative process was given freely to the public in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer (1813-1857), a sculptor and photographer. He disclosed the operational details in an 18 February 1851 letter published in The Chemist, n.s. v. 2 no. 19, March 1851, pp. 257-258.
5. This was a review of Robert Hunt, Photography: a Treatise on the Chemical Changes Produced by Solar Radiation, and the Production of Pictures from Nature, by the Daguerreotype, Calotype, and other Photographic Processes (London: Griffin & Company, 1852), published in the The Athenaeum (London), no. 1278, 24 April 1852, pp.461–462. The unknown reviewer felt that Hunt relied too much on the language of others, ‘adding some contributions of his own, not new, and not always very intelligible’.