William Henry Fox Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot was a pioneering British inventor and photographer, born on February 11, 1800, in Melbury, Dorset. He is best known for developing early photography techniques that laid the groundwork for modern photography. Talbot's interest in natural sciences, particularly optics and chemistry, propelled him to explore the challenges of capturing images. His frustrations during a trip to Italy in 1833, where he struggled to create accurate drawings, inspired him to innovate beyond traditional methods.
Talbot discovered a process known as the calotype, which involved coating paper with light-sensitive chemicals, allowing images to be permanently imprinted. This technique enabled the production of negatives, which could be used to create multiple positive prints—a significant advancement over existing methods at the time. Although his work was overshadowed by Louis Daguerre's contemporaneous developments, Talbot's contributions to the field of photography were foundational, introducing key terms like "developing" and "negative" that are still used today.
In addition to his technical achievements, Talbot's photographs continue to be celebrated, with collections displayed in prominent museums worldwide. He married Constance Mundy in 1833 and had four children before passing away on September 17, 1877, at Lacock Abbey, where he is buried. Talbot's legacy endures as an essential figure in the history of photography.
William Henry Fox Talbot
Photographer, inventor
- Born: February 11, 1800
- Place of Birth: Place of birth: Melbury,Dorset, England
- Died: September 17, 1877
- Place of Death: Place of death: Lacock, Wiltshire, England
Education: Trinity College, Cambridge, England
Significance: William Henry Fox Talbot was a British inventor and photographer who is credited with the development of early photography techniques.
Background
William Henry Fox Talbot was born on February 11, 1800, in the town of Melbury in Dorset, England. He was the only child of William Davenport Talbot, an army Dragoon captain, and Lady Elisabeth Fox Strangways. His maternal grandfather was the second Earl of Lichester, Henry Thomas Fox-Strangways (1747–1802). His father owned Lacock Abbey, an enormous country house in Wiltshire, which had been in the family for more than three hundred years, but the family was deeply in debt.
Fox Talbot’s father died when he was only five months old. His mother remarried in 1804 to Captain Charles Feilding, who treated Fox Talbot as his own son. The couple had two daughters in 1808 and 1810.
Fox Talbot was a curious boy who was interested in astronomy, mathematics, optics, and botany. He also had a special interest in chemistry and conducted many experiments. He entered Trinity College in Cambridge in 1817 and was ranked twelfth in his class. He graduated in 1821 and was made a fellow in the Royal Astronomical Society in 1822.
After completing his formal studies, Fox Talbot published papers on mathematics. When he met famed astronomer John Herschel (1792–1871) in 1824, he became interested in the study of light. Fox Talbot then published articles about light, including "Monochromatic Light" and "Chemical Changes of Color" both published in 1827.
Life’s Work
Fox Talbot had a lifelong interest in nature and botany, and his frustration with being unable to draw images of the scenery at Lake Como during an 1833 trip to Italy led him to develop better photography techniques.
Fox Talbot was attempting to use a camera lucida, a simple device that uses a mirror to reflect an image onto a piece of paper to enable the viewer to trace key elements. It was designed to help artists capture perspective in their drawings, but it had a number of limitations. Fox Talbot was frustrated with his inability to overcome its deficiencies, which led him to think that it would be great to be able to permanently imprint images on paper.
Several others had already experimented with the technology Fox Talbot needed to achieve his goal, including Thomas Wedgwood (1771–1805), who had produced short-lived images from natural objects such as leaves, and Joseph Nicéphore de Niepce (1765–1833), who had found a way to create images on bitumen, a natural form of asphalt. Fox Talbot also recalled his own earlier experience with another instrument used to assist artists when drawing pictures, a camera obscura. This device uses a box with a hole in it that allows light to enter and reflect off a mirror, resulting in a reversed image of whatever is in the line of sight of the hole.
Working in his family’s home, Fox Talbot experimented with various ways of coating paper to make it light-sensitive. He discovered that if he soaked the paper in a weak solution of water and table salt, let it dry, and then added a heavy coat of silver nitrate to one side, the resulting silver chloride coating would be light-sensitive. When this paper was placed in the camera obscura and exposed to an image, the patterns of light and dark that comprised the image were imprinted on the paper. Similar experiments had been tried previously by Wedgwood and others; the difference was that Fox Talbot' had found a way to use additional chemicals to prevent the image from disappearing after further exposure to light. He called the resulting image a calotype. A calotype was more like a contemporary photo negative, with the image reversed and light areas appearing dark and vice versa.
Fox Talbot made additional improvements to his process, including using the calotype to expose another sheet of treated paper to create a positive print. He also discovered that he could produce an image faster if he used silver iodide in place of silver nitrate. His original technique required the treated paper to be exposed to the image for an hour or more, but he was able to shorten that exposure time to just a few minutes. This made the technique more practical for use with live subjects.
He made the announcement of his discoveries in 1939, a few weeks after Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) had announced his technique for capturing images. Although the processes the two men used were very different and Fox Talbot had images to prove that he had been using his technique longer, Daguerre’s technique became more popular, in part because he offered it for free and Fox Talbot did not.
Impact
In addition to his groundbreaking techniques for creating calotypes, Fox Talbot also devised techniques for printing multiple images from one calotype (unlike the Daguerre' process, which only allowed for one image). Fox Talbot also discovered a way to use ink to render the images more permanent, protecting them from slowly disappearing over time from light exposure. His friend John Herschel named the processes Fox Talbot used "developing," "fixing," and "negative"—terms still used in photography. Fox Talbot’s ideas formed the basis for photography as it has come to be known.
Talbot’s works continued to draw attention in the twenty-first century, with his photographs on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Several of his works were also sold on auction in the 2010s and 2020s.
Personal
Fox Talbot married Constance Mundy on October 20, 1833. They had four children: Ela, Rosamund, Matilda, and Charles. During his lifetime, he preferred to be called Henry F. Talbot or H.F. Talbot, but historians generally refer to him as William Henry Fox Talbot or Henry Fox Talbot. Fox Talbot suffered from ill health in his later years and died on September 17, 1877, in his family’s home at Lacock Abbey. He is buried in the cemetery there in a family plot.
Bibliography
Daniel, Malcolm. "William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 – 1877) and the Invention of Photography." Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oct. 2004, www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tlbt/hd‗tlbt.htm. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
Ings, Simon. "William Henry Fox Talbot and the Birth of the Photograph." New Scientist, April 2016, www.newscientist.com/article/mg23030683-200-william-henry-fox-talbot-and-the-birth-of-the-photograph/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
"William Henry Fox Talbot." Artnet, 2024, www.artnet.com/artists/william-henry-fox-talbot/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
"William Henry Fox Talbot." The J. Paul Getty Museum, www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103KJK. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
"William Henry Fox Talbot: A Biography." The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project, foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/talbot/biography. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.
"William Henry Fox Talbot (1800 – 1877)." BBC, 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic‗figures/fox‗talbot‗william‗henry.shtml Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.