What is believed to be the first published drawing of a pinhole camera was printed in 1545 in a work by the Dutch mathematician, astronomer and mapmaker Gemma Frisius, De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica:
Frisius had used this camera obscura (a term coined by Johannes Kepler) to study the solar eclipse of 1544. An actual photograph taken by a pinhole camera, however, would not be seen until several decades after photographs had been produced by other means (the 1850s, to be precise).
In 1727 a German professor of anatomy, Johann Heinrich Schulze, accidentally discovered that it was light, not heat (as had been presumed from observations in previous centuries) that caused silver salts to darken when exposed to sunlight, though he made no attempt at permanently preserving the images thus created:
I covered the glass with dark material, exposing a little part for the free entry of light. Thus I often wrote names and whole sentences on paper and carefully cut away the inked parts with a sharp knife. I struck the paper thus perforated on the glass with wax. It was not long before the sun's rays, where they hit the glass through the cut-out parts of the paper, wrote each word or sentence on the chalk precipitate so exactly and distinctly that many who were curious about the experiment but ignorant of its nature took occasion to attribute the thing to some sort of trick....
In 1760 a novel, Giphantie, was published by Tiphaigne de la Roche, Charles-François (whose fictional works anticipated inventions such as television and synthetic food):
The book likely would have languished in obscurity were it not for the fact that it fictionally depicts, almost seven decades before the process actually was discovered, modern-day chemical photography:
You know that rays of light reflected from different bodies form pictures, paint the image reflected on all polished surfaces, for example, on the retina of the eye, on water, and on glass. The spirits have sought to fix these fleeting images; they have made a subtle matter by means of which a picture is formed in the twinkling of an eye. They coat a piece of canvas with this matter, and place it in front of the object to be taken. The first effect of this cloth is similar to that of a mirror, but by means of its viscous nature the prepared canvas, as is not the case with the mirror, retains a facsimile of the image. The mirror represents images faithfully, but retains none; our canvas reflects them no less faithfully, but retains them all. This impression of the image is instantaneous. The canvas is then removed and deposited in a dark place. An hour later the impression is dry, and you have a picture the more precious in that no art can imitate its truthfulness....
The books depicted here, like those depicted in yesterday's post, are rarely found in the marketplace, especially in anything approaching Fine condition, and when available command often enormous sums. This applies also to the books about photography published in the first few decades following Niépce's discovery, as we shall see shortly....
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