Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805)
Encyclopedia
Josiah Wedgwood
Josiah Wedgwood was an English potter, founder of the Wedgwood company, credited with the industrialization of the manufacture of pottery. A prominent abolitionist, Wedgwood is remembered for his "Am I Not A Man And A Brother?" anti-slavery medallion. He was a member of the Darwin–Wedgwood family...
, the potter, was an early experimenter with Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet FRS MRIA was a British chemist and inventor. He is probably best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine...
in photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
.
Life
Thomas Wedgwood born in May 1771 in Etruria, StaffordshireEtruria, Staffordshire
Etruria is a suburb of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England.-Home of Wedgwood:Etruria was the fourth and penultimate site for the Wedgwood pottery business. Josiah Wedgwood, who was previously based in Burslem, opened his new works in 1769. It was named after the Italian district of Etruria,...
, now part of the city of Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-on-Trent , also called The Potteries is a city in Staffordshire, England, which forms a linear conurbation almost 12 miles long, with an area of . Together with the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme Stoke forms The Potteries Urban Area...
in England.
Wedgwood was born into a long line of pottery manufacturers, grew up and was educated at Etruria and was instilled from his youth with a love for art. He also spent much of his short life associating with painters, sculptors, and poets, to whom he was able to be a patron after he inherited his father's wealth in 1795.
As a young adult, Wedgwood became interested in the best method of educating children, and spent time studying infants. From his observations, he concluded that most of the information that young brains absorbed came through the eyes, and were thus related to light and pictures. His attempts to create permanent pictures created by the use of light might have been an attempt to aid in the improvement of teaching, although they led him to invent photography itself (see below).
Wedgwood never married and had no children. His biographer notes that "neither his extant letters nor family tradition tell us of his caring for any woman outside the circle of his relations" and that he was "strongly attracted" to musical and sensitive young men.
He died in the county of Dorset
Dorset
Dorset , is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. The county town is Dorchester which is situated in the south. The Hampshire towns of Bournemouth and Christchurch joined the county with the reorganisation of local government in 1974...
.
The pioneer of photography
Wedgwood is credited with a major contribution to photography and technology, for being the first man to think of and develop a method to copy visible images chemically to permanent media.In his many experiments with heat and light – and possibly with advice on silver nitrate from his tutor Alexander Chisholm
Alexander Chisholm
Alexander Chisholm was a political figure in Upper Canada.He was born in Scotland in 1790 and migrated to Glengarry County in 1817. In 1825, he became a colonel in the local militia. He represented the county in the 12th and 13th Parliaments. He died at Alexandria in 1854.- External links :*...
and from members of the Lunar Society
Lunar Society
The Lunar Society of Birmingham was a dinner club and informal learned society of prominent figures in the Midlands Enlightenment, including industrialists, natural philosophers and intellectuals, who met regularly between 1765 and 1813 in Birmingham, England. At first called the Lunar Circle,...
– Wedgwood first used ceramic pots coated with silver nitrate as well as treated paper and white leather as media of print, and had the most success with the white leather. Although he originally tried to create images with a “camera obscura
Camera obscura
The camera obscura is an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen. It is used in drawing and for entertainment, and was one of the inventions that led to photography. The device consists of a box or room with a hole in one side...
,” his attempts were unsuccessful. His major achievements were the printing of an object’s profile through direct contact with the treated paper, thus creating an image’s shape on paper, and, by a similar method, copying transparent paintings-on-glass through direct contact and exposure to sunlight.
The dates of his first experiments in photography are unknown, but he is known to have advised James Watt
James Watt
James Watt, FRS, FRSE was a Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer whose improvements to the Newcomen steam engine were fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world.While working as an instrument maker at the...
(1736–1819) on the process of photography, circa 1790 or 1791. Watt wrote to Wedgwood...
- "Dear Sir, I thank you for your instructions as to the Silver Pictures, about which, when at home, I will make some experiments."
Sometime in the 1790s, Wedgwood devised a repeatable method of chemically staining an object's silhouette to paper by coating the paper with silver nitrate
Silver nitrate
Silver nitrate is an inorganic compound with chemical formula . This compound is a versatile precursor to many other silver compounds, such as those used in photography. It is far less sensitive to light than the halides...
and exposing the paper, with the object on top, to natural light, then preserving it in a dark room. The establishment of this repeatable process was, essentially, the birth of photography as we know it today. Wedgwood thus became one of the earliest experimenters in photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
– and certainly the earliest who deserves the title of "photographer", conceiving of prints as pictures. It should be noted, however, that new discoveries in the prehistory of photography are being made by historians almost every year.
Wedgwood met a young chemist named Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet FRS MRIA was a British chemist and inventor. He is probably best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine...
(1778–1829) at the Pneumatic Clinic in Bristol, while Wedgwood was there being treated for consumption. Davy wrote up his friend's work for publication in London’s Journal of the Royal Institution
Royal Institution
The Royal Institution of Great Britain is an organization devoted to scientific education and research, based in London.-Overview:...
(1802), and titled it “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver. Invented by T.Wedgwood, Esq.” The paper was published and detailed Wedgwood’s procedures and accomplishments, yet the institution was not the venerable force it is today. At the time the Journal was:
- "a little paper printed from time to time to let the subscribers to the infant institution know what was being done ...the 'Journal' did not live beyond a first volume. There is nothing to show that Davy's account was ever read at any meeting; and the print of it would have been read, apparently, if read at all, only by the small circle of members and subscribers to the institution, of whom, we may be pretty sure, only a small minority can have been scientific people." (Litchfield, p.196-197).
Nevertheless, the paper of 1802 and Wedgwood's work directly influenced other chemists and scientists delving into the craft of photography, since subsequent research (Batchen, p. 228) has show it was actually quite widely known about and was mentioned in chemistry textbooks as early as 1803. David Brewster
David Brewster
Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA FSSA MICE was a Scottish physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, writer and university principal.-Early life:...
, later a close friend of William Fox Talbot
William Fox Talbot
William Henry Fox Talbot was a British inventor and a pioneer of photography. He was the inventor of calotype process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an...
, published an account of the paper in the Edinburgh Magazine (Dec 1802). The paper was translated into French, and also printed in Germany in 1811. Certainly J. B. Reade
Joseph Bancroft Reade
Rev. Joseph Bancroft Reade FRS was an English clergyman, amateur scientist and pioneer of photography.-Early life:...
's research in the 1830s was directly influenced by knowledge of Wedgwood's procedure of tanning the leather for his prints. Tanning photographic paper was discovered to be helpful by shrinking the size of the silver nitrate grains, and this method was communicated to Fox Talbot by a friend of Reade – as was proven in a court case over patents. Fox Talbot found a suitable fixative for the process, around 1838. Photography quickly became popular thereafter. For instance, in Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood, whose novels are English literature standards...
's novel Shirley (1849), toward the end of chapter XXIV the author writes of a portrait photograph – described as having been made of eight-year old Caroline, one of the main characters in the novel. In the novel this should have happened somewhere in 1802.
It is commonly assumed that Wedgwood was initially unable to permanently fix his pictures to make them immune to the further action of light, as was stated in Davy's paper of 1802. The picture, Davy wrote...
- "immediately after being taken, must be kept in some obscure place. It may indeed be examined in the shade, but in this case the exposure should be only for a few minutes; by the light of candles and lamps, as commonly employed, it is not sensibly affected."
However, in 1885 Samuel Highly published an article in which he remarked he had seen what must have been fixed examples of early pictures made by Wedgwood, pictures presumably made in the 1790s. One of the major historians of early British photography, Dr Larry J Schaaf, has suggested at length that a surviving photogenic drawing of a leaf (attributed to William Fox Talbot) could in fact be by Wedgwood, and might date from 1790. If this can be confirmed, then Wedgwood would be the true inventor of the standard photographic process, though limited to photograms and not true camera obscura photographs.
Patronage of Coleridge
Wedgwood was a friend of the poet Samuel Taylor ColeridgeSamuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
and arranged for him to have an annuity of £150 in 1798 so Coleridge could devote himself to philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
and poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
.
Afterlife in fiction
Thomas Wedgwood starred as a leading character in the historical mystery novel titled The Spyders of Burslem (2011).Further reading
- Litchfield, Richard Buckley (1903). Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer: An Account of His Life. London, Duckworth and Co. This book includes the whole text of the famous 1802 paper.
- Batchen, Geoffrey (1999). Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. MIT Press.
- Gregory, R.L. (2005). "Accentuating the negative: Tom Wedgwood (1771 - 1805), photography and perception". Perception 34 (5), pages 513–520.