Henry Fox Talbot, "Sur la Production des images photographiques instantanees", in Comptes rendus, volume 33 no. 22, 1 December 1851, with the Fox Talbot contribution on pp pp 623-627 in the weekly issue of pp (589)-632. This issue is removed from a larger bound volume and still intact, fresh and crisp. Very Good copy. $250 William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was among the earliest of the photographic pioneers, or pre-pioneers, as he asserted priority of his photographic method for 1835 when Daguerre revealed his own (very different) method in 1839. Talbot (or Fox Talbot) was also a practitioner of the art, publishing a stone-cold and revolutionary work of photographically illustrated books, The Pencil of Nature.
Well. The whole idea of the "instantaneous" photograph is a bit tricky and involved, and it all depends on how the word "instantaneous" is defined. This was happily done in the mid 1840's as an image made in 12 to 15 minutes. Later of course it would mean different things, but when Fox Talbot was writing on the topic of fast exposure the term meant being able to capture say the rustling of cloth in wind, moving trains, clouds, and other similar motions--these though were somewhat ahead of the technology, though that issue would be turned around by the time Marey and Muybridge began their work in pre-cinema instant photography in the 1870s and 1880s.
That said, Talbot is seen in places as the first among equals in the creation of high speed photography. So writes Lincoln L. Endelman in his "A Brief History of High Speed Photography 1851-1930" and which is available on the web https://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-hs-history.html who says:
"The beginning of high speed photography might be considered to be William Henry Fox Talbot's experiment in 1851. He attached a page of the London Times newspaper to a wheel, which was rotated in front of his wet plate camera in a darkened room. As the wheel rotated, Talbot exposed a few square inches of the newspaper page for about 1/2000th of a second, using spark illumination from Leyden jars. This experiment resulted in a readable image. Considering the extremely low sensitivity of a wet plate, called "amphyitypes", which were glass plates coated with a mixture of albumen, silver nitrate, and water (approximate ASA less than 4), and the lenses that were available (probably about f/32), this photograph was a remarkable achievement."
Actually the idea of what "instantly" means over time seems like it would be an interesting bit of research.
See: Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, by Phillip Prodger, Tom Gunning, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.
Also with a paper by Jacques Babinet, "Calculs relatifs au Scintillometre de M. Arago".
Comments