Can horses fly, or: on the history of photography - Part II

About the first inventors and the French government's tribute to the world of photography, when was color photography invented and the solution to the horse flight puzzle * The second part of the review

to the first part of the article

The first photographer

The first to solve this problem, and who was actually called the 'first photographer', was the Frenchman Joseph Niepce, at the beginning of the 19th century. Nièpes was very interested in drawing and painting, but since he was not a particularly successful painter in his own right (so according to the stories), he sought to perfect alternative techniques. He researched the field of printing and lithography, and was particularly interested in the problem of "fixing" the image obtained after exposing the chemical substances, which we mentioned earlier, to light, i.e. preventing them from fading.

The solution Nips found for this problem was to use asphalt, the same asphalt we drive on the road, or more precisely a material that is a derivative of the normal asphalt. Asphalt hardens when exposed to the sun, and Neeps used this feature wisely. He spread the material on a metal plate, and placed it inside a camera (camera obscura) of a suitable size in front of the view of the buildings from his window. After he finished taking pictures, Shaft pinched the metal plate and removed all those parts from it that did not harden as a result of exposure to the sun. What Nips got was an asphalt relief of the view from the window. This was the first photo ever taken. It received the name 'heliograph', which is a combination of the Greek words: 'helios' (sun) and 'graph' (chart), and surprisingly it has survived to this day and is displayed at the University of Texas in the United States.

Nièpes presented the results of his research and his heliographs to the Royal Society of Science in England, but because he refused to fully divulge the secrets of his invention, the scientists refused to give him the serious institutional approval he sought. The disappointed Nièpes returned to France, but fate can sometimes play tricks on us, and precisely what initially appeared to be a failure - is the one that paved the way to the development of photography.

On his return to Paris, Nièpes formed a business partnership with Louis Daguerre, an artist who specialized in various kinds of light entertainment and even had a successful and famous light theater in Paris, which attracted many spectators. Daguerre was not a chemist, but his interest in light and optical phenomena naturally drew him towards photography. One anecdote tells that a famous professor of chemistry came to France to lecture on some subject, and at the end of one of the lectures a young woman approached him and told him that she was the wife of Louis Daguerre. Her husband, the woman said, is completely convinced that it will be possible to develop a process of photography and is so obsessed with the matter that he can hardly sleep at night. Out of concern for her husband, she asked the professor whether according to his opinion it would be possible to take pictures on this day, or if her husband was just hallucinating. The lecturer replied that in his opinion this would be absolutely possible.

An accidental breakthrough

Nièpes worked together with Daguerre to perfect his invention, but in 1833 Nièpes passed away unexpectedly as a result of a stroke. Dagger decided to continue the work on his own. He abandoned the asphalt as a basis for the creation of the images, and turned to compounds of the element silver.

His first breakthrough happened, apparently, by accident. Until then, everyone who tried to develop chemical processes for photography started from the premise that as soon as you expose the chemical to light, meaning - actually taking the picture - you should get a visible result. I mean, you should see the image appear on the chemical.

But sometimes our intuition can mislead us: chemical processes, even if they occur following exposure to light, do not always have to show, or at least not immediately, as Daguerre discovered.

One of the experiments he did was a failure: he took a picture, but nothing appeared on the photographic plate. According to one version of the story, Daguerre put the exposed photographic plate in the cabinet where he kept all his laboratory equipment, possibly to store it. Later, when he pulled the photographic board out of the closet, he was amazed to find that the picture he had taken earlier suddenly appeared on the photographic board! Daguerre investigated this mysterious success, and concluded that a broken thermometer inside the instrument cabinet had released mercury vapor into the air, and these vapors are the key to the formation of the image. This story may not be accurate and has undergone some dramatic exaggeration over the years, but it is clear, in any case, that Dagger first discovered the photo development process, which for us today is self-evident: you take a photo, give the film to the store and a technician develops the film and returns photos to you.

This breakthrough in the development process had a dramatic effect on photography. Nipps used an asphalt-like material, but asphalt takes a long time to harden and dry, so in order to get a picture it had to be exposed to the sun for eight hours. Beyond the discomfort of the long and tiring exposure, the image itself does not always reflect reality: in Nieps's first photograph, for example, the one of the buildings that stood in front of his room window, the sun in the image illuminates the houses from all sides - a result of the movement of the sun during the eight hours of exposure. Obviously, this is not the case in the real world, and we are used to also seeing the shadow of the building created when the sun illuminates it from one side only.

If you photograph buildings it's not so bad, but if you like to photograph people, you won't find many people willing to sit in front of the camera for eight hours. I photograph my daughter with an exposure of 3 hundredths of a second, and I still have a hard time getting her to sit still for that long. The development process that Dagger discovered made it possible to reduce the exposure time from eight hours to half an hour, a significant improvement by all accounts.

Patent against image fading

Dagger's second breakthrough occurred shortly after the first. As I mentioned before, one of the main problems with shooting with silver compounds is that the images fade over time, especially after exposure to the sun. Dagger discovered that the image could be fixed on the photographic plate by a simple wash in warm salt water.

In 1839, having a perfect photographic process from start to finish, Daguerre approached the French Academy of Sciences and presented the invention, which he called 'daguerreotype'.

The academics tested the new process, and could not contain their enthusiasm. The photos Dagger produced were sharp and clear beyond anything that could be imagined at the time, and the photography process was simple and fast enough that it could be repeated quickly and efficiently dozens and hundreds of times a day. The representative of the Academy published a message to the media in which he praised and praised the Daguerreotype, so much so that under the influence of the Academy, the French government purchased the rights to the new invention from Daguerre's hands. The happy inventor received a guaranteed government salary for the rest of his life, while the French government did something for which we all owe it a great deal of gratitude to this day: it gave photography as a gift to the world. The French government published the details of the photography process for free to anyone, so anyone who wanted to could open their own photo shop.

The reception that daguerreotype received in the world was nothing less than amazing. Everyone who saw Dagger's footage was blown away. One of the newspapers wrote about the new invention:
"We have seen the views taken in Paris by means of the daguerreotype, and we do not hesitate to swear that they are the most admirable objects of art that we have ever seen. Their incredible perfection almost crosses the line of the unbelievable."

Within only ten years of the announcement of the invention, thousands of photography shops and studios were established throughout Europe. The first to feel the impact of the new daguerreotype tsunami were the portrait painters: painting a high-quality portrait was very expensive, took a long time, and even then the level of accuracy and similarity of the final product to its original depended on the level of concentration and talent of the painter.

The daguerreotype, on the other hand, was cheap, anyone could take pictures if they had the appropriate knowledge, and the sharpness of the resulting images was so amazing that there were people who actually avoided looking at the photographs, with the feeling that there must be some kind of blasphemy here, or maybe you decide You will feel that the copy is a little more successful than the original and you will try to jump to it. In any case, the result was that most portrait painters learned to take pictures themselves, or went out of business.

The public could not stop watching the pictures. Researchers and world explorers took daguerreotype cameras with them and returned to Europe with spectacular pictures of the pyramids in Egypt and the ancient walls of Jerusalem - sights that the common man did not have much of a chance to see for himself in his lifetime. Samuel Morse, an American artist and the man who invented the famous Morse code for use in telegraphs, visited Daguerre in Paris and when he returned to the United States he brought the Daguerreotype message with him, where it was received with open arms. All the familiar images of the American workers in their Levi's jeans during the California gold rush days, and all the harsh and uncomfortably realistic footage of the American Civil War, were all done on Daguerreotape.

Half an hour exposure

But all this does not mean that the photographic process developed by Daguerre was perfect, absolutely not. A half-hour exposure, although better than an eight-hour exposure, is still half an hour in which the subject has to sit still. In order for the image to come out sharp and clear, the photo was taken in strong light - that is, under the blazing sun. Half an hour without moving, when you are dressed in your best Shabbat clothes (a portrait, nevertheless..) and drying in the sun... we can assume that it was as enjoyable as, for example, not at all.

Long exposure is not always desirable in other types of photography either - whoever saw photos of Paris taken using the daguerreotype method must have scratched their head and asked themselves where all the Parisians were, because in all the photos the streets of this beautiful city were completely empty. I know some cynical Israelis who will say that it only does Paris good, but still - there are French people there! The explanation is that the long exposure meant that no figure of a pedestrian was captured on the photographic plate, unless he happened to be standing still for long minutes.

In a short time, fortunately, other researchers succeeded in perfecting the daguerreotype method, and shortening the exposure time from minutes to seconds - but the difficulties did not end there. Some of the materials used in the development process, such as mercury, were highly toxic, certainly not things you would want to keep in your cupboard at home. The pictures themselves were very delicate and sensitive to the touch, so they were usually kept in insulated glass boxes - and it was good to keep them well, because there were no copies. Each photo was one of a kind, and cannot be duplicated.

It is clear, then, that there was a lot of room for improvement - and indeed, in an incredibly short time, it arrived. In fact, it came even before the invention of the daguerreotype.

William Fox Talbot, or Fox Talbot for short, developed his own method of photography in England, completely separate from Dagger. He even preceded Daguerre, and the first photographs he took were taken in 1835, a full four years before Daguerre announced his own invention. In his method, Talbot used a plate coated with a compound of silver and iodine, which, after being exposed to light and performing additional chemical processes, became a pattern that could be copied onto another plate. Talbot actually made a negative of the image. Talbot called his invention 'Clotype', from the Greek word 'klos', beautiful or good.

For various reasons, Talbot did not make his invention public and only informed members of the British Royal Society of Sciences about his work. But when the news came out of France about the Daguerreotype, Talbot realized that he was losing the right to be the first, and hurried to publicize the Clootype. The uniqueness of Talbot's invention is that the clotype made it possible to print countless copies of the same original, or negative. This was a significant advantage over daguerreotype - but the photos with the clotype method came out blurry and not particularly good quality. For this reason, it was the daguerreotype that took the world by storm, and not the clutype.

Although the French government gave the daguerreotype as a gift to the world for free, the only place you couldn't make use of this process was across the channel, in neighboring Britain. Daguerre, for some unknown reason, decided to patent his invention exclusively in Britain, two weeks before the invention was purchased by the French government. This fact should have helped Talbot conquer the local market, despite the qualitative inferiority of the clotape - if Talbot had not insisted on registering a patent for the invention, and demanding very high sums from anyone who wanted to engage in photography professionally.

It is understandable why Fox Talbot did not give up the right to cut a coupon from his invention: he invested very large sums of money from his own pocket to develop the invention. But because he insisted on taking anyone who infringed his patent to court, he became a very unpopular figure in Britain, and the media whipped him mercilessly.

Progress, what to do, cannot be stopped. A few years later, another researcher came along and managed to find a more successful method than the claytype, although based on similar principles. He also did not patent the invention, so anyone who wanted could make use of it.

Talbot, for his part, declared that the new method was still the same as his Clotape, and that he would sue anyone who used it without paying him. He quickly found himself in court again, but this time on the losing side: the court ruled that the new process was different enough from the clotype to not be included under the protection umbrella of the original patent. The disillusioned Talbot realized that any chance of future profit from his invention was gone, and did not even try to renew the patent for the tape when it expired.

He can take solace, however, in the fact that it was his invention, and not the daguerreotype, that eventually became the basis of modern photography. The daguerreotype, although (at least initially) more successful, was ultimately a technological dead end. The future lay in the duct tape negative.

The clotape and the daguerreotype broke the dam, and from then on photography progressed by leaps and bounds. The development and exposure processes were rapidly refined, and the cameras themselves became smaller and smaller. The metal photographic plates were replaced by glass plates, followed by paper. Improvement followed improvement, and within a few decades, photography turned from the domain of professional photographers into something that every person can enjoy.

I will not go over all the improvements and transformations that the photography process has undergone over the years, but I feel a moral obligation to mention two important names. The first was George Eastman, an American from New York who in 1884 developed the rolled film we know from analog cameras. This film - small, compact and fortunately no longer toxic (if you don't eat it, of course), made it possible to make the cameras smaller and lower their price until everyone could afford a 'Kodak' camera, the camera developed by Eastman.

The second important researcher is James Clark Maxwell, a Scottish scientist who also lived around the middle of the 19th century. Any of the listeners who studied a subject from the exact sciences must have heard of Maxwell, who was an extraordinarily prolific mathematician and physicist. His developments and discoveries formed the basis of Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum theory, he reached important conclusions in thermodynamics and control theory, and received his most extensive publication thanks to groundbreaking research in the theory of electricity and magnetism. There are four equations named after him, Maxwell's equations, which are among the most important in this field, and one day - when I want to lose all my listeners - I will give a detailed explanation of all these equations. Don't count on it.

Color photography in the 19th century

Anyway, it was Maxwell who paved the way to color photography. This versatile and prolific scientist also studied the photographic processes, and together with another scientist named Thomas Satin, conducted experiments in 1861 that included the use of color filters.

They took a particularly colorful strip of traditional Scottish cloth, and photographed it three times - each shot through a different filter: one filter passed only the blue areas of the image, a second filter only the red areas and the third only the green areas. The result was three black-and-white images, with each image showing only the parts of the image that were in the color that passed through the filter.

Now Maxwell and Satin took the pictures and projected them simultaneously onto the wall using a projector, with the light from each picture again passing through its colored filter. That is, the image taken through the red filter is projected on the screen again through a red filter, and so on for all other colors. The overall image, which is a combination of the three individual images, is obtained as a color image for everything.

The interesting detail about the whole story about Maxwell and his colorful strip of cloth is that this shot was not supposed to work. When modern scientists tried to reproduce Maxwell's original experiment, with the strip of cloth, the filters and the photographic equipment, they discovered that the substance that Maxwell smeared on his photographic plate, the compound that creates the image itself, is not sensitive to red light at all, but only to blue light, ultraviolet light and a little A little to a bluish-greenish color. I mean, Maxwell was supposed to actually receive only one shot out of the three - the shot through the filter that transmits blue light. The other two shots, the green and the red, were supposed to be completely blank. In practice, the resulting final image was supposed to show only the blue parts of the tartan strip.

It turns out that the ancient proverb (speaking of ancient proverbs, which this chapter is rich in for some reason) - 'One ounce of luck is worth a ton of intelligence', is also valid for proven geniuses like Maxwell. The traditional Scottish strip also reflected, quite by accident as it turned out, ultraviolet light - which luckily passed unhindered through the red filter. The bluish-greenish color passed through the green filter with great difficulty, but after a very long exposure time, the researchers were able to get an acceptable image from it as well.

In this way, Maxwell was able to show that color photography was possible and push all other researchers and inventors to move in this direction. If Maxwell's experiment had failed, as it was supposed to fail, color photography would have been delayed, probably, in a good few years.

The connection between the development of photography and the world of horse racing

I have already described earlier what a far-reaching effect the invention of photography had on the public and on art, but I did not discuss the effect that photography had on the horse racing industry. Yes, horses.

One of the most fascinating debates in the 19th century was whether a horse could fly. Well, I'm exaggerating a bit here for the sake of drama, no one really thought that horses could fly - but there was a very heated discussion on the following question: does the horse, while galloping, lift all four of its legs off the ground at the same time. I mean, is there a certain moment when the horse flies, for a split second. Half of the people swore they could see the legs all lift into the air, and the other half were convinced they saw at least one leg touching the ground at any given time.

This argument may sound a little barren and futile, but I remind you that this is horse racing. In a horse race there is not so much to do: nevertheless, how much you can cheer on the horse you love - this is not football, and the horse doesn't really care about you. The only thing that attracts people to horse racing is the gambling. The types who go to horse races obviously like to gamble - and so the question of whether the horse can fly turned from a completely banal wish into a matter of life, death, money and honor. A lot of people put a lot of money on the table. As a side note, this story can also teach us something about humans: in later years it turned out that the galloping horse's legs were moving faster than the human eye could, biologically, perceive, and yet there were many people who were sure enough that they saw what they saw to bet on The interest in large sums.

One of the most respected patrons of the horse racing industry was Leland Stanford, the governor of California, a rich railroad tycoon and the man after whom one of the most elite universities in the world today is named: the university that produced the founders of Google and Yahoo, just for the sake of the example.

Stanford developed a strong love for horses in general and horse racing in particular, and belonged to the camp of those who believed that horses could fly. Contrary to a common urban legend, he did not bet on the matter - but for people of Stanford's caliber, respect is also worth a lot of money, and if Stanford says the horse can fly, then he means it and he will prove it.

The invention of photography fell into Stanford's hands just in time - he knew that only a photo showing the horse hanging in the air while galloping would be conclusive proof and close the debate once and for all. He approached a world-renowned photographer named Edward Muybridge to take the required photo, and offered him several thousand dollars in return.

Muybridge was indeed the right man for the job. He was a brilliant photographer, one of the best at that time - but there were two difficult problems that had to be overcome.

The first, the technological problem. To freeze a horse while running, the exposure of the photographic plate has to be very fast, on the order of hundredths of a second. Today, there is no problem to achieve such a fast exposure - every camera has a part called an 'aperture', which knows how to open and close within milliseconds even, and enables a very fast exposure. But then, in the seventies of the 19th century, the aperture had not yet been invented. Photographers would cover the lens with a black board, or even just a regular hat, remove the cover for a few seconds and then put it back on again. It's all well and good for landscape or portrait photography, but for capturing a horse in the air it no longer does the job.

Muybridge initially refused Stanford's offer, simply because he thought the matter was impossible - but Stanford was not one to be turned down easily, and eventually Muybridge agreed to accept the assignment. He conducted many experiments, and finally developed a kind of home-made aperture: two panels that stood in front of the lens, and were connected by an electric cable to the race track. When the horse stepped on the appropriate point in the track, the panels opened and closed quickly, exposing the photograph for the required amount of time.

The second problem was even more difficult, and it was called Edward Muybridge.

According to Newton's unknown fourth law, the more successful the artist, the more eccentric and wild he will necessarily be. That was certainly true in Muybridge's case, at least.

While working on the shoot, he discovered that his beloved wife was cheating on him. He found a letter she had sent to her lover, a theater critic named Harry. And worse, he discovered that his wife had attached a picture of their little son to the letter and had written 'little Harry' on it, meaning the child is not his.
Muybridge, to use an accurate psychiatric medical diagnosis, went berserk. He took a gun, ambushed his lover secretly, and shot him once in the heart.

He was put on trial, of course, for murder. The outcome of the trial was somewhat surprising - the jury determined that the murder was justified, and Muybridge went free. He took his suitcases and left the United States for Central America for a year, a kind of 'voluntary exile'.
This unusual story delayed the work on the image of the running horse for a whole year, and only when the photographer finally returned from exile did he continue to develop the complex technology required for the photograph.

This story also has other tragic sides: the child of Muybridge and his wife, suspected of being a bastard, was placed in an orphanage where he grew up without his parents - but when he was already an adult, his features clearly showed how much he resembled his father: Edward Mubridge.

Back to the horse thing. The fateful day has come. Muybridge placed twenty-four cameras along the racetrack, all connected by electrical cables to various points in the ground. The galloping horse stormed past them, and in twenty minutes Muybridge was out with news for Stanford and the rest of the world. Horses, it turns out, can fly.

Can horses fly, or: on the history of photography - Part I

מקור

This article is taken from the show's script.Making history!', a bi-weekly podcast about the history of science and technology.