Author: Karen Odden

A quick history of the daguerreotype

(Such a cool word that I was never sure how to pronounce: duh-GARE-uh-type)

On this day (January 9) in 1839, the daguerreotype, which many consider the first viable photographic process, was publicly announced at the French Academy of Science. It was also announced in the London periodical The Athenaeum the same month and stirred great interest in England.  

Daguerreotype of Edgar Allen Poe. By Edwin H. Manchester, 1848

As with many inventions, photography emerged as the result of several inventors working individually and in collaboration. In 1826, what some consider the first photograph was taken by the Frenchman Joseph-Nicephore Niepce. It was of a barn. However, it required an 8-hour exposure time. This was not particularly viable in many cases – portraits, for example.

The first daguerreotype, which required less than half an hour, was taken in 1838, when Daguerre captured the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, including a shoe-shiner and his customer in the lower left-hand quadrant (near the curb).

The daguerreotype quickly became popular and was recognized as a major step forward in modes of representation. Edgar Allen Poe called it “the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph of modern science,” and the artist, critic, and author John Ruskin claimed, “Amongst all the mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given us at any rate one antidote: the daguerreotype” (1845).

What’s the backstory?

Louis Jacques Daguerre

Louis Jacques Daguerre was born November 18, 1787 in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, France (died 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London). Daguerre’s early professional life included being an artist and an assistant set designer for stage plays. He strove to dazzle his audience with realistic scenes that represented day turning to night and good weather to bad, and created the impression of motion. He later called them “dioramas,” or “dramas of light.” His illusions depended on representing objects realistically, which he accomplished with the help of a camera obscura.

The “camera obscura” – a light-proof box, with a lens, through which an image passed – had long been used by artists as a tool to increase the accuracy of representing three-dimensional objects in two dimensions. With an object’s image projected on paper or canvas, the artist could then more accurately sketch his or her representation of the object.

Basic mechanism of the camera obscura

Daguerre became interested in finding a way to fix the image on a surface or plate without the artist’s intervention. Building on the work of Niepce, he sought a special material that might capture an image inside the camera obscura and then stop capturing anything more, so the image was rendered permanent.

Daguerre eventually hit upon using silver-plated copper sheets, which he treated with iodine to make them sensitive to light. After projecting the image onto them in the presence of light, he exposed the plates to warm mercury vapor, which combined with the silver to fix the image. A saline wash prevented further exposure.

The daguerreotype was popular into the mid-1850s, when new technologies including glass negatives and paper prints, which had the advantage of being reproducible, evolved.

“An Gorta Mor” – The Great Hunger: The Potato Famine that Drove Michael Corravan’s parents from Ireland to Liverpool in the 1840s…

An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store by Cork artist Daniel MacDonald, c. 1847

First domesticated in South America more than 7,000 years ago, the potato was brought to Europe by the Spanish in the late 16th century after their conquest of the Inca. When a series of non-potato crop failures struck northern Europe in the late 18th century, millions of farmers in France, Belgium, Holland, and England switched to the potato as their staple crop.

The situation in Ireland was unfortunate for the native Irish. Under the Penal Laws, Irish Catholics were forbidden from owning land, so as a result, English and Anglo-English gentry owned most of the land in Ireland, leasing parcels to the Irish, who were tenant farmers who paid rent. In the mid-1700s, the landowners introduced one variety of potato, which quickly became a staple for both the Irish people and their livestock – cattle, which were largely exported to England. The “Irish lumper” could grow efficiently in poor soil on small farms (many were less than an acre), had three times the caloric value of grain, and were easy to store and slow to spoil – an ideal crop for hardworking farmers, many of whom consumed between 40 and 60 potatoes per day.

A blighted potato, blackened and corky

By the early 1800s, however, the potato crop had failed a few times, and what scientists now know to have been the plant pathogen Phytophthora infestans (or P. infestans) blighted crops across Europe; by late 1845, over one-third of Ireland’s crop had been ruined. The following year, three-quarters of the potato harvest was destroyed, and Irish were beginning to starve.

One of the underlying difficulties was that from 1801, when Ireland joined with Great Britain in the Act of Union in 1801, Irish Members of Parliament traveled to Westminster, and they were not the best advocates for the Irish farmers. Indeed, of the 105 Irish in the House of Commons and the 28 Irish Peers in the House of Lords, most were landowners or sons of landowners of British origin. They did petition Queen Victoria to repeal the Corn Laws (laws which inflated the prices of grain to protect English farmers), and this was done, but because Ireland lacked working mills to process grain, it wasn’t much use. Indeed, landowners continued to export livestock, peas, beans, rabbits, fish, honey, and dairy goods to England during the famine. Absentee British landlords evicted thousands of starving peasants when they could no longer pay rent, and the workhouses and charity institutions that were established to help the vulnerable were poorly managed and became centers of squalor and disease.

The potato blight continued for another six years, until 1852, with the result that 1 million Irish people – nearly one-eighth of the population! — died, and between 1 and 2 million were forced to emigrate to North America, Australia, and England. Many Irish made their way to Liverpool, the nearest English port across the Irish Sea; this is where I have Michael Corravan’s parents meet, as Saoirse takes a position as a maid and Patrick attempts to find work as a silversmith.

Irish feeling the famine traveled 135 miles from Dublin to Liverpool, across the Irish Sea

With the area around Liverpool’s Mersey River overrun with Irish, many opted to board “coffin ships” to Canada and America, so called because nearly 30% of the passengers died on them. It’s reported that sharks followed the ships because so many bodies were thrown overboard.

Those Irish who stayed behind, haunted by their country’s suffering, would form the basis of an attempt to return the Irish Parliament to Dublin (known as the push for Irish Home Rule), which underpins the plot of Under a Veiled Moon, and an independence movement that continued into the 20th century.