Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

276 reMeMberING the SpaCe aGe
III. aN abbreVIateD hIStOrY Of phOtOGraphY
the nineteenth century began by believing that what was
reasonable was true and it wound up by believing that what
it saw a photograph of was true—from the fnish of a horse
race to the nebulae in the sky. the photograph has been
accepted as showing that impossible desideratum of the historian—wie
es eigentlich gewesen—how it actually was. 6
In 1836, more than 120 years before the dawn of the Space age, the sciences
of chemistry and optics began to come together, resulting in the inevitable
invention of photography. 7 as early as 1826 in france, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
was able to capture an image with an eight hour exposure of sunlight through
a camera obscura. he called his results, which eventually faded on bitumen
paper, a heliograph. What eluded Niépce, however, was the ability to fx and
chemically secure the image permanently. a few years later, in 1837, Louis­
Jacques-Mandé Daguerre discovered a process that captured and fxed an image
on a polished silver surface. before exposure to sunlight through a camera, the
silver surface had to be exposed to the fumes of iodine. Once sensitized and
exposed, it was developed in a vapor bath of hot mercury. this process resulted
in a daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes, however unique and precious, were oneof-a
kind, small in size, fragile, and not reproducible. 8
by 1835, William fox talbot, a british nobleman, was able to do what
scientists, alchemists, inventors, and artists had been unable to do: create exactly
reproducible pictorial images. he called his image reproduction a calotype.
With the calotype, talbot fgured out the basic principles of photography:
how to get images of things he saw in a camera obscura on paper and how to
make them permanent. Given both the competitiveness and thus simultaneity
of photography’s invention, he put together the fndings in a paper presented
to the royal Society in London. 9 talbot read his paper, “Some account of the
art of photogenic Drawing, or the process by which Natural Objects may be
to Delineate themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil,” on January 31,
1839—six months before Daguerre’s ofcial presentation. 10 When considering
a timeline, it was 119 years to the day until the launch of explorer 1.
6. Ibid., p. 94.
7. Ibid., p. 116.
8. Ibid., p. 120.
9. Ibid., p. 122.
10. by the next decade, photographic experimentation moved across the ocean to america. In 1840,
Dr. John Draper of New York City was the frst to make a 20 minute exposure of the Moon on
a daguerreotype.to mark the historical signifcance of Draper’s image, consider that the date was
230 years after the 1610 publication of Galileo’s drawings of the Moon in Sidereus Nuncius and